You can find Derek Willis at the front doors of the East 96 Campus most Sunday mornings along with his beautiful wife, Abby. They’ll greet you enthusiastically with huge smiles in the church lobby. They’ll even remember your name and make you feel comfortable. Always cheerful, their three spunky daughters mingle easily with their church family. They all seem to know everyone.  

 Active, energetic, and friendly, Derek and Abby fit into their First Impressions roles quite well. They also serve as leaders in the church as Navigators, and Derek recently began serving in Student Ministry, offering his energy and wisdom to a group of sixth-grade boys.   

But just six short years ago, Derek sat in his home office looking out the window onto a beautiful spring day as sunshine poured in the window while a dark knot of depression gnawed at his mind. “It was… the most beautiful day you could ever see,” he recalled. “And I’ve got these three beautiful kids running around. A beautiful wife. This beautiful life. And all I felt was emptiness inside.”  

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Derek’s struggle with depression began his freshman year of high school after suffering concussions while playing football. At the time he was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and began taking medication to control it. For him depression played out through mental fog punctuated with scattered and incohesive thoughts and communication. Depression “was always something in the background” of his life and “really took on a life of its own” during stress-induced depressive episodes. During major depressive episodes, he would take time off school and, later, work.  

Any time he’d try to get off medication, he would fall into another depressive episode. “I always kind of struggled with it,” he said. But he learned to deal with it, and nobody really knew the toll these episodes took on him or the effort he put into managing life. He set up his life in a way that displayed his very best qualities and talents.  

He met Abby during their time at Lamar University, and they later began dating as co-workers. The pair gravitated toward one another with natural vitality, enjoying similar interests like sports, spending time with friends, and just experiencing and enjoying life together.  

During their engagement, a co-worker, Steven Pittman, invited them to join his and his wife’s married couple’s small group. Derek and Abby were not attending church at the time, but Abby’s mother had always advised her that if she kept Christ at the center of her marriage, they could get through anything. Derek looked at the possibility from a more strategic perspective, desiring to know what a successful marriage looked like in the couples who would be in that group. They were all in.  

To Derek, the doctrine of Jesus was attractive. Derek had quite a bit of exposure to faith and an intellectual knowledge of God but not a personal relationship. Very quickly, they were both drawn into the community of small group. Derek saw real people living out real life faith, being open and vulnerable. He hadn’t had much experience with vulnerability, but he felt pulled toward it. Abby was immediately drawn in to small group because of the deep and intimate friendships gained that she didn’t have in other circles. 

The couple began attending services at Clear Creek Community Church soon after joining the Pittman’s small group, and both came to faith in 2010.   

“Derek was on fire for God,” Abby recalled. Derek had a strong desire for knowledge and felt the need to confess sins and ask forgiveness in certain relationships. They both made some radical life changes to surrender fully to God, and they grew in tremendous ways by accepting spiritual mentors into their lives. They married in 2011 and were baptized later that same year.  

 

I waited patiently for the Lord to hear me… 

 

Derek and Abby are truly one another’s closest friends. At the time, Abby was one of the few people who understood and witnessed Derek’s mental health struggles, and Derek had long ago accepted the status quo feeling on medication—himself but slightly numb. He thought, Well, this is me. I get depressed sometimes. I can’t fight it.  

Abby simply loved and cared for him through it all. And they maintained their life through it all—growth in church leadership, job changes, and the birth of three daughters. While their life wasn’t perfect, it sure looked like it was. And they were content.  

In late January of 2020, Derek called Abby on his way home early from work one day. She was staying at home with their three young children at the time and recalled his words clearly: “Abby, I think something’s wrong with me. I can’t even complete full sentences. I can’t think thoughts. Something is wrong with me.” And he repeated this one statement: “My brain is broken.” 

Looking back, Derek sees some incidents that could have led to this deep low. He’d been on back-to-back rounds of antibiotics for a bad case of strep throat earlier that winter and then been given more responsibility at work, which became highly stressful. Then one day everything culminated, and he shut down.  

Abby saw very quickly that this time was different. She took charge, setting up doctor’s appointments and taking care of everything at home.  

“I really couldn’t form thoughts,” Derek said. “She had to think for me.” For example, he couldn’t think of the simple steps it would take for him to get ready for an appointment. And they went to many appointments, seeing four psychiatrists and two neurologists among other types of health specialists.  

Daily life changed drastically for them. Derek took a leave of absence from work and eventually took short-term disability as well. A truth they’d once learned during a church series on mental health guided Abby and Derek about his treatment. This truth was to first treat the spiritual and then treat the physical. So, Derek would spend hours each day at the library meditating on God’s word, hoping that piecing together the words on the page would break through not only his mental fog, but his spiritual fog as well. He thought that if he could comprehend the words on the page, then that would fill up the void he felt inside.  

 Mostly, he was just afraid.  

“He was scared he was going to be like this for the rest of his life,” Abby recalled. “He would say, ‘I don’t think my brain is ever going to come back.’”   

“What was typical for me was seeing everything through the lens of the depression,” Derek explained. “You can’t remember when you were happy. I would say yeah, I know that when I get depressed I think like that, and I come out of it. But I really think my brain is broken, and I don’t think God is ever going to fix me.” 

But Derek wasn’t angry with God about this. He almost saw it as an eventuality because of how he saw himself: I’m not good enough, and people aren’t going to like me. 

“My idol is human approval,” he admitted. He’d worn a mask of self-sufficiency his entire life, and now it had been stripped away.  

 

…and he turned to me and heard my cry. 

 

One of the few events on their calendar they decided to keep during that season was Nav Retreat, even though Derek was scared because he was still struggling to formulate conversations with others—a task that had once come easily. He’d told very few friends what was really going on.  

He felt the spiritual low of this depression more acutely than others in the past, and he longed for God to speak to him. He felt that “joy was evading” him, and though he could intellectually agree that God loved him, he could no longer feel it. He no longer believed it.  

But during that Nav Retreat, God began softening Derek’s heart toward him again, and he began with Derek’s community.  

During one service, attendees were invited to write notes expressing gratitude to others in the congregation. 

“There was a line of guys to give Derek their card,” Abby remembered, reading from her journal at the time. “It was so beautiful. I wish Derek could see how much he means to others, how worthy he is, that God loves him, and that he is using Derek as an ambassador for Christ.”  

Derek remembered Nav Retreat as the “inflection point” God used to begin lifting him out of this depression. “That was God’s answer to my prayer,” Derek said. “He spoke to me.” This was just the starting point to understanding how much he needed authentic friendships.  

 

He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire. 

 

After several weeks at home and with short-term disability running out, Derek and Abby became worried about the future. Derek still wasn’t fully out of the depression, and his thoughts were still clouded. Just as a decision loomed, the whole world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Derek’s project was shut down, but he retained his job.  The very thing they’d been praying for—more time for Derek to recover—was provided in a most unexpected way, and it blew Derek and Abby away. 

 

He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along. 

 

Derek felt seen by God again, and this enabled him to focus more intently on recovery. His energy was up enough to manage time with his daughters, so they didn’t know anything was wrong. He spent his days sleeping and exercising, fueling his body with nutritious foods and supplements and realigning his medications, while also pouring more and more energy into his daily rhythms of Bible meditation and prayer, counseling and family time.  

One day, as the mental fog began to lift, he asked Abby how she was doing. Abby had been Derek’s rock, praying over him, reading Scripture to him, speaking truth into his mind and heart when he couldn’t grasp it. Truthfully, she had begun to feel distant from Derek because he was so focused on healing. But she’d been fueling herself with time in the Bible and prayer, journaling, and venting her concerns and worries to a close circle of friends.  

So, she brushed off Derek’s question, but he kept pressing. Finally, she broke down into tears with “I’m not okay!” confessing the distance she felt and the burdens she carried. But Derek was finally strong enough to take some of the weight for her, and they began a journey toward repairing their relationship.  

 

He has given me a new song to sing, 

A hymn of praise to our God. 

Many will see what he has done and be amazed.  

They will put their trust in the LORD.  

Psalm 40: 1-3 (NLT)  

 

“God’s always communicating with us,” Derek says. “He’s always exposing something in us or teaching us about ourselves. This depression is the avenue by which he grew me spiritually.”  

Derek realized that up to the time of this depressive episode, much of his spiritual life was abstract to a certain point. Even God’s love for him was abstract to a large degree.  

He understands now that God needed to guide him into a truer and more fulfilling spiritual relationship. Derek’s weak spot had been his inability to be vulnerable with others, to truly unmask his shame and allow his community to know him.  

But community is exactly where God wanted him. It was “God’s way of wiping away my shame and making his love very tangible for me,” Derek recalled.  

Through truly authentic Christian friendships, Derek was able to understand that “the way through shame is through vulnerability and confession.” Out of a desperate need for relief and healing, he began to open up, confessing his true feelings with friends he knew cared for him. As those friends met Derek with their own struggles with shame, he began to understand that he could put that mask of self-sufficiency away for good.   

 Journeying through this “dark night of the soul” brought Derek to his very lowest point. It broke him and his constant reliance on human approval. God began to address his feelings of inadequacy and shame, targeting them with a fierce love that burned through lies he had believed about himself for as long as he could remember.  

“I was very weak spiritually up to that point,” he confesses. “Fast forward [six] years later, I’m way stronger spiritually. My belief in God is affirmed and trued-up. Less abstract and more concrete. Now, I know how to fight. I know how to identify thought patterns in my head, and I know how to take those patterns captive and destroy the lies.”  

Because of his struggle, Derek believes he has a new purpose in his role as ambassador for Christ, as Abby had seen even in the midst of his depression. “God has uniquely used the pain I endured to strengthen and equip me to walk with people through struggles,” he says, “helping them to see the spiritual component, wage war on the battlefront of the mind, and fix their eyes on Jesus in the midst of their pain.”  

He connects with David in Psalm 23 as David walks through the valley of the shadow of death. “[God] leads me there and is with me the whole time. And then David says, ‘Your goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.’ So, God’s goodness and mercy is always going after him. When hardships happen, God’s always there. He’s always working. So, I don’t ask ‘Why am I going through this? Why does it have to be me?’ It’s more like, ‘God, what do you want for me in this?’ Because I know he has a purpose.”  

Derek feels like a phoenix risen from the ashes; that everything about him has changed. His relationship with God has transformed, and he now finds rest in the fact that he is truly loved by God just as he is.