Hi Kaylynn, I had to read your initial post several times before thinking I had got to the essence of what you are saying. Maybe I have not got to that essence; if not, I am sure you will tell me.
Your depression appears to be existentially-based. Your perception of whether or not you perceive God is at work in the world, or even exists, determines whether or not you are depressed.
My answer, for myself as much as for you, may seem counter-intuitive; but let me explain. To begin with, narrow your perception to the Gospels. Old Testament stories have been “theologised” for centuries. By this I mean that stories from the ancient past were constantly reviewed to be the carrier of theology. How much of fact remains after such a long process? The Samaritans, who were the remnant of the northern kingdom of Israel, even maintained that the people of Judah, (that is, the Jews), made up much of the Old Testament when they were in the Exile in Babylon. Go first to the Gospels, which were written within decades of the events they describe, and used source material that was even closer to the events than the completed Gospels themselves.
The next step - the counter-intuitive one - is to free yourself from the need to decide “what actually happened”. Failure to free oneself from this need led 19th Century Liberalism, (a theological movement at the end of the 19th century), to decide that the miracles of Jesus and his resurrection could not have happened. After all, at the end of the 19th century, everybody knew that was true, right? The problem was that “what everybody knows to be true” changes with each passing century. In Nicholas Copernicus’ time, everybody knew that the Earth could not be in motion, 'cos we’d all fall off, right? Wrong!
Most of our assumptions about what actually happened, or happens, tell us as much about ourselves and our generation, as it does about real, objective truth. We have a tendency to believe that when it comes to knowing things, we have actually “arrived”. At the end of the 19th century this view was held with a high degree of arrogance. This arrogance was soon blown away at the beginning of the 20th century with Einstein’s theories of relativity and developments in quantum physics. Nevertheless, there are still some fine 19th century minds in the life of the Christian churches.
But I digress. The counter-intuitive thing: Let’s approach this question as historians. The lesson we have learned from the arrogance of 19th century liberalism is that historians cannot tell you “what actually happened”. They can only tell you what people at the time believed had happened, and this takes a great weight off our shoulders. People at the time believed that Jesus performed miracles and that he was literally raised from the dead. Now we won’t have to be constantly trying to hammer our square peg into their round hole - trying to twist the Biblical Greek into some kind of forced interpretation that would suit our mind-set, or declaring everything a metaphor when only some things are, or seeing the lost ending of Mark’s Gospel as an indication that the resurrection never literally happened.
You may be cynical, but try it for 5 minutes to see if it relieves existential angst. As for mystery, it seems to occur as much in science as in the Christian Faith. Think about time. At the center of our galaxy there is a super-massive black hole in which time comes to an end. That means that the end of time occurs spatially alongside the process of time. Is such an end of time somehow related to the eschatology of the New Testament? Mind blowing stuff really.
