Your Personality + His Spirit, part 5 out of 5: Melancholy

                               “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.”~Anne Shirley


If you know someone who seems particularly thoughtful or quiet, often lost in their own world of analyzing everything and everyone around them, it is very likely that this person is a melancholy. Melancholies are the analyzing ones who can have the ability to spend hours on end just thinking and brewing over the smallest details. While this type of sensitivity can be very useful for finding important nuances in life and sensing when something is amiss in others, it can also be very harmful because of the way it leads a melancholy into sinful patterns of negativity and selfishness.
My favorite fictional character who is a melancholy is the lovable Anne of Green Gables. Her wild imagination and thoughtfulness allows her to live in her own world for hours on end. Another indication of her melancholy temperament is the fact that she holds a grudge against someone (Gilbert Blythe, to be exact) for years, simply because he called her hair "carrots".
For this temperament, I interviewed a good family friend, K.M. She runs an incredible ministry with her piano playing and communication skills and she just recently started a television show called "Faithpoint" in which she interviews Godly men and women about their faiths.

1. What do you think is one of your greatest strengths as a melancholy? How have you been able to work for the Lord with this strength?

I think one of the greatest strengths that God has helped me to use for Him is to be sensitive to others—to be compassionate and empathetic. I understand what will be a blessing to them, and then I ask God to help me to be that way.

Years ago, I remember sitting and really trying to picture how people felt when they were around Jesus. I made a list of the things that they might experience just by being near Him because I wanted people to experience those things when they were with me.  

I thought about how Jesus really focused on people and how He cared about them at every level. He let them know that He saw them and that He understood them and was interested in them.  That’s how I wanted to be. I wanted to focus in on people and really listen to them. One of the deepest longings of every person's heart is to be understood and I wanted people to recognize me as someone who really cares about them and wants to know them and understand them.

In asking God to help open my eyes to be empathetic, I have wanted to especially notice even the people who might not ordinarily be noticed. So when I go into a room I'm always looking to make sure no one is sitting alone or eating alone. I draw everyone into conversations. I try to notice when people are doing a good job and I thank them.

2. How have you learned to put others before yourself and think about the interests of others?

I think maybe that learning to put the interests of others ahead of my own hasn’t been as big an issue for me because of the empathy God has put in my heart.

But there is another issue that He has worked on in me and that is how I have wrongly judged the motives of others when they say or do things that hurt me or that I don’t agree with. A few years ago, God opened my eyes to see that I was very quick to feel secretly condemning (or spiritually superior) when someone spoke in a way that I perceived as negative or critical or proud. Without even being aware of it, I would take their words and assign them the heart motives I would have if I had spoken those words. I just assumed no one would say or do those things unless their motives matched what mine would be.

God has been showing me not to put my motives on someone else. He reminds me that I don’t know their heart and I need to realize that they could have any number of reasons for doing or saying something—even good reasons. Just because I could only picture myself doing or saying those things with wrong intent, doesn’t mean that their intentions were wrong.

3. What is one of the most uncomfortable things for you to do in social situations?

Go to them. ;) I love being alone. It takes a lot of mental energy and concentration for me to be with people. If I have to go into a situation with people I want to slip into the back and sit quietly in a corner and not be noticed, but usually that isn’t an option.  It’s draining for me to be with people except for a very small circle of people I love and am close to.

4. What do you believe is one of the biggest downfalls of a melancholy?

Not recognizing when they have crossed the line from productive thinking to non-productive thinking.

Not recognizing when they have moved from careful planning to worry; from better self-understanding to selfish focus; from trying to be empathetic to over-analyzing the motives of others. It is so easy to miss this line—the point between what is useful and valuable thought and what is a waste of time and nonproductive, even counter-productive.

I think a melancholy may need to be particularly vigilant to ask God to help them have the mind of Christ at every moment; to keep our thoughts and the meditations of our heart on His glory.

5. Have you seen this weakness have a negative effect in a melancholy's life (either in your own life or someone else's)? What happened?
 

I have been in situations where I need to give prayerful assessment to a serious situation but instead of carefully thinking through things with a picture of God in my mind, I wander away into imagining gloomy “what if” scenarios. In the name of “careful planning,” I’m trying to figure out all the possible ways things could go wrong and how I will handle them.  So my thoughts stray from thinking through something with God’s peace and provision central in my heart to thinking through something with my own resources. I grow more and more anxious as I realize there are so many things that could go wrong and I don't have the answers. Anxiety is settling upon me because I took my eyes and thoughts off Him and crossed that line without even realizing it.

Or maybe someone has said something to me and I’m wondering why they said it. I’ll focus in on it and try to figure out all the possible nuances and just basically wallow around in a morass of pointless speculation instead of turning it over to God and asking Him to glorify Himself in that situation, no matter what their motives were.

Or I might take a remark that someone made that seemed critical or hurtful, and I’ll mentally imagine all these follow-up conversations where I'm brilliantly defending myself so that they will understand me and agree with me and see how wrong they were.  I'm investing incredible emotional energy into these mental conversations and thought processes that are completely not productive or honoring to God.

Instead of being on guard to keep my focus ultimately on God and His authority in my life, I'm instead focusing on myself or I'm focusing on others or I'm focusing on possible alarming situations and harmful outcomes—trying to picture myself handling all of it with my own resources.

And the bottom line is that these negative forebodings can grow to sort of cripple you and keep you from investing your emotional energy in praise, and in serving God with gladness,  and in joyfully finding the life He has for you.

6. Is there a specific Bible verse that addresses this weakness? If so, what is it?

A verse that I have loved for years is Proverbs 4:23—“Guard your thoughts because out of your thoughts comes your life.” I also like Philippians 4:8 – “And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.”

Our entire life begins in our mind—in our heart focus. When we bring our thoughts into captivity to Christ, yielding to His control and authority, and glorifying Him in our private inward contemplations and conversations—then out of those thoughts the rest of our life flows to His glory.

7. How has God's word and His work in your life changed the way that you address your weaknesses as a melancholy?

I actually see that being a melancholy gives me weak tendencies on two extremes: On the one hand I can feel very confident in my creativity or in my ability to assess and think through a situation; and on the other hand I can be second-guessing and over-analyzing and wondering if I did okay, or if I could have done better.

The one extreme can lead to a sense of pride, a sense of self-reliance; and then the other extreme can lead you to feel guilty or paralyzed or self-focused.

In each of those areas God is teaching me to do my work with “my whole heart unto the Lord”, and to “be strong in the Lord”, and that “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength”.  He calls me to be faithful to Him; that’s the only standard. Because service and gifting and successes come through my connection to the Vine, there’s no room to either feel pride of accomplishment or to fear that I have somehow failed.

Because it is all done through Him and for Him I can leave the results in His hands.