I really appreciated Michael’s honesty and willingness to serve as an example. I think his last sentence is profound, perhaps more than he realizes.

Thanks to John Barach, here is some advice Luther gave to a ruler prone to depression:

I should like to encourage Your Grace, who are a young man, always to be joyful, to engage in riding and hunting, and to seek the company of others who may be able to rejoice with Your Grace in a godly and honorable way. For solitude and inwardness are poisonous and deadly to all people, and especially to a young man. Accordingly, God has commanded us to be joyful in his presence; he does not desire a gloomy sacrifice. [Luther quotes Ecclesiastes 12.] No one realizes how much harm it does a young person to avoid pleasure and cultivate solitude and sadness. Your grace has Master Nicholas Hausman and many others near at hand. Be merry with them; for gladness and good cheer, when decent and proper, are the best medicine for a young person–indeed, for all people. I myself, who have spent a good part of my life in sorrow and gloom, now seek and find pleasure wherever I can. Praise God, we now have sufficient understanding of the Word of God to be able to rejoice with a good conscience and to use God’s gifts with thanksgiving, for he created them for this purpose and is pleased when we use them (Martin Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Theodore G. Tappert [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955], pp. 92-93).

Of course, this may be all aggravated by the internet to some degree. A website is not a tavern and cyberspace has many things but communities are not among them.

Last night I was reminded how much meat and drink around a table can matter more than words. That’s not an absolute comparison, of course. Just like diamonds are priced higher than water, when words are common and real-life closeness is missing then the doing of the latter is much more important than yet another set of words. Sharing a bottle or a brat over a table can form something that will never come to be sharing words over the screen.

Something much more cheerful.