Mental Health

There is a person in your church who is no longer in your church. They have not left the faith. They have left the building. These are not the same thing. Part three of Radical Hospitality: Creating Room for Mental Wellness.

The meal train ends. The depression does not. Isaiah does not say send them food. He says bring them in. Part two of Radical Hospitality: Creating Room for Mental Wellness.

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.

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.

You want to help. Someone you love has gone somewhere inside themselves that you cannot follow. Your instinct is to fix. Yet this is often the least useful in the room with depression.

The lonely and the grieving are talking to a chatbot. It cannot interrupt. It cannot wound you. And that is the thing we have to look at honestly — because a relationship that cannot wound you is, in the same motion, a relationship that cannot love you.

Most of us were never handed the contract explicitly. Nobody said real Christians, walking faithfully, do not have minds that come undone. We absorbed it in pieces — in the testimony, in the unprayed-for prayer request, in the verse on the wall. The script is still running. The cost is not theoretical.