Finding Purpose Through Anxiety and Depression - Matty Mullins

I got to a point in my life where I was always confident. The band was doing well. My marriage was doing well. Then I started having panic attacks. I got really depressed. And all of that confidence was stripped away from me in an instant. I don't expect people that haven't struggled with anxiety and depression to know what that's like, but those that have know that it robs you of everything. Even on the outside, everything looked good, but on the inside, I was completely falling apart. For anybody that's dealing with those things, you kind of work through it in layers. It's not like you just wake up one day and you start having panic attacks. It's a lot of things that build up over time. And so you have all this baggage that you're carrying. A lot of people don't even realize they're carrying it, and you get to a point where your body is just saying, I can't do this anymore. And that's what panic is. That's what anxiety is. You know, it's not actually scary. It's not actually harmful. It's your body giving you a sign. It's the way that God designed our bodies to tell us when we've hit our limit. It's actually a really beautiful thing if you're able to learn enough about it to see it that way. But the overarching, big thing that really carried me through was just needing that real intimate connection with Jesus. Until you actually get into the Word and understand it, until the Word starts to come to life in front of you and God's revealing things about the Word in your own life and in ways that you can really understand and see it firsthand, you never really start to see a change. I had gotten to a point in my life where I didn't need to change. And then I got to a point where I had to change. Something had to change. It was either, you know, me standing on the rooftop of my condo in downtown Seattle and saying, like, "what is all of this worth? What does this mean?" Or me finding purpose in just being a son of God, you know, a son of Jesus? And I dove in a whole new way that season and that newfound understanding of the Creator of the universe loving me, just little me, it saved my life.