Articles

The hungry in your congregation are not always the ones with empty plates. The Lord's first instruction in Isaiah 58:7 is not fix their hunger. It is share your bread. Part one of Radical Hospitality: Creating Room for Mental Wellness.

You used to feel things. Now you feel nothing. You have not lost your faith. You have lost your feelings. These are not the same thing — and the church has, for a long time, taught us they were.

God won't give you more than you can handle. Everything happens for a reason. They meant well. The sentence sat in your chest for the rest of the afternoon, doing a quiet damage you could not name. The problem is not your faith.

You have taken from me friend and neighbour — darkness is my closest friend. Heman was not only in the dark. He was in the dark alone. The wound of being left is its own wound. Part four of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Anger at God is not the failure of faith. Apathy is. The angry person is still on the line. The apathetic person has hung up. Part three of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Most lament psalms turn at some point — yet I will trust, but you, O Lord. Psalm 88 has no pivot. It ends in the dark. The editors knew, and they left it. Part two of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Heman was a chief musician of the temple. He led worship for the king. By every external measure, his life was working — and he wrote one of the bleakest sentences in the Bible. Darkness is my closest friend. Part one of A Slow Walk Through Psalm 88.

Resilience a good quality. But somewhere along the way it became something you were supposed to have — and the moment it became a demand, the person who could not bounce back fast enough became, by definition, deficient.

The world is quietly walking away from hustle culture, and the church has not yet noticed. You are still going. The calendar is still full. And somewhere underneath, a question has started to surface — was this the shape it was supposed to take?

The acute part is over. The phone calls have stopped. The casseroles have stopped. And you are not, in any sense fine. The church often does not have a category for the long middle — the person who survived but is still, in some genuine sense, carrying it.

A cure is the removal of the problem. Healing is the slow restoration of the whole person. The church has used these words as if they meant the same thing. They do not, and the confusion is doing real damage.

Most of us did not realise how much of who we were was the role we were doing. Then the role ended. The children grew up. The position was restructured. And in the silence afterwards, you discovered something most of us discover too late — you had not just lost a role. You had lost a self.