Welcome to our website’s blog! According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 21 million adults in the United States experience at least one major depressive episode each year.
For years, I considered depression to be more of a character failure or a spiritual problem. My perspective was simple: I figured that if a person was struggling mentally, the way to handle it was simply to repent of sin and follow God.
Now I’m ashamed of that perspective; here’s why.
I was called upon to review thousands of life insurance applications in a compressed time period as a Case Manager for a large financial and life insurance company. Over the span of a few months, I processed over 5,000 applications. The majority of the adult applicants were taking medications for various emotional and mental struggles. But what made my jaw drop was the percentage of applications submitted by parents for their teenage children who were on these medications; parents quietly taking out policies to protect their financial investment against the worst-case scenario. While I cannot share proprietary numbers from those confidential files, it told a clear story: we are in trouble.
Depression was no longer an abstract concept to me. The subject was piling on at every turn. The applications were one thing, but it seemed like I was being confronted with real, living, breathing human beings every day who struggled with some form of depression or anxiety. I began meeting and talking with people who were quietly fighting these daily battles.
The Three-Year Pummeling
Then the storm hit my own home. For about a three-year stretch, I was getting pummeled. You ever feel like that? One thing after another.
My dad succumbed to Parkinson’s and dementia. The arthritis in my hands got so bad I couldn’t keep up with the pace at work anymore, which led to a series of demotions until I was finally let go. My income plummeted. Then my doctor diagnosed me with depression and wrote a prescription for me to see a counselor. What!? Me?
Trapped in the dark, I was now facing the very reality I had seen on those thousands of application pages. I felt like I was in a dungeon.
Mining for Gold
I knew I needed to pivot, so I set out to become a self-employed voice actor and audiobook narrator. But as anyone in voiceover will tell you, when you are building a business from scratch, you pour in thousands of hours of effort long before the income starts to follow. We were feeling the strain in every way.
During that season, I sought counsel from a man I love and respect, Dr. John Currid, who was serving as an associate pastor at our church at the time. He knew I was struggling with depression, and he knew I needed public domain books to record to build my portfolio and launch a business. He looked at me and gave me simple advice: “You need to read John Bunyan.”
I wonder if either one of us realized that day that his advice would set my feet on a life-changing course forever.
He didn’t give me a title, just the author’s name. So I went mining.
I searched through public domain archives and found a Bunyan collection titled The Riches of Bunyan as Selected from His Works. Part Systematic Theology, part autobiography, and all soul searching: it was the perfect book for me.
Eventually I decided to republish these works in two volumes: Pilgrim on God and Salvation, and Pilgrim on the Path to Eternity. The copy I found was a scan of a handwritten copy. So I became pretty familiar with the book as I retyped the entire thing, corrected spelling, tidied up the grammar. Eventually, I realized it made the most sense to split it into two distinct volumes: Pilgrim on God and Salvation. When I was completed; Dr. Currid graciously agreed to review my work, he wrote a foreword for the books, and Puritan Publishing was starting to take shape, although I didn’t know it yet!
Living the Dungeon
To record the “Pilgrim” books, I stepped into my booth and applied the character-acting techniques I learned from my coach, Carol Monda. She taught me deep immersion—how to stop reading lines off a page and instead inhabit a persona, breathe their air, and vocalize their inner world.
For hours a day in the dark of the booth, I “lived” Bunyan’s dungeon experience, even losing 80 pounds during that stretch simply because I stopped eating. I was fully in character, feeling the weight of his reality.
John Bunyan spent twelve years locked away in a damp, filthy Bedford jail. But what struck me as I recorded his words was that he didn’t write a self-help checklist. He didn’t write, “If you are depressed, do these three things.” It wasn’t like that at all.
Instead, with nothing beside him except a Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, this uneducated tinker wrote expert thoughts on God, handled complex theology with clarity, and mentioned his pending death or the gallows only a couple of times. His writing was consistently focused outward, loving God and praying for others.
The Realization
Sitting in that booth, watching a man write glorious, unshakeable truths while trapped in absolute filth, my mind began to shift.
By the time I was halfway through recording Pilgrim on God and Salvation, two things happened: I was being transformed, and I knew I was reading something that could genuinely help the people struggling with depression, sadness, loneliness, particularly Christians whose hope ultimately is in Jesus Christ.
Bunyan showed me that the answer to deep human trouble isn’t a modern platitude. The solution is Jesus, and the Puritans simply know how to help you find Him in the middle of your dungeon.
I couldn’t keep what I was reading to myself. The truths I was recording became the shovel I used to tunnel out of my dungeon of depression. That is why Puritan Publishing exists today: to make these wonderful old Christian books front of mind, to remind folks just how relevant the Puritans are, and catalogue and package the books in ways that can serve and meet you in whichever season of life you find yourself.
We are also modernizing a number of titles for today’s reader, because they are not dusty museum pieces. They are battle-tested lifelines, and I am living proof that they still work.
Stay tuned for future posts!
