Mental Health

Monet painted his shadows blue and violet because the sky still lights the shade. The writer of Lamentations found God's love holding him in the ruins of Jerusalem. Your grey season may hold colour you cannot see yet.

Psalm 37:25 says the righteous are never forsaken. For people in depression or poverty, the verse can sound like a verdict on their faith. Scripture rejects that reading, and the psalm offers something gentler.

You stop coming, and someone writes drifting. Psalm 71 gives words to being read wrongly while you are struggling, and points to the one verdict about your belonging that no neighbour has the authority to rewrite.

A song of promise sung by people whose lives had not changed in months. Israel walked into the sea still complaining, and the water held anyway. On the hope that speaks before you can feel it.

You sat near the back and hoped nobody would ask how you were doing. Whatever everyone else carried in, your hands were empty. But the comfort that reached you where you were sinking is the one that you can offer to others.

Scripture says three times that Mephibosheth was lame in both feet, and it saves the last time for the final line of the chapter, after he is already seated at the king's table. Nobody healed him. He was welcome anyway.

You were the ugly duckling of the family, and everyone had a way of letting you know it. You carried that verdict as if it were your own face. But what God saw in the secret place was there before any of them looked.

The day after fire fell from heaven, Elijah sat under a desert shrub and asked God to take his life. God did not send a speech. He sent bread, water, and rest, twice, for a man who had nothing left.

She called the pastor at 2am, speaking of messages and a mission. He prayed and told her to rest. He did not know he was hearing a psychiatric emergency, or that she needed a hospital that night. Part 7 of Church Mental Health Series.