Mental Health : A Word.
What do you need to be okay?
Hey! There’s a lot of new faces here - so let me catch you up on what’s happening. We’re at the end of the second dimension of life that we offer to God: our emotions. We’ve spent the last two months covering obstacles to life with God, offering our attention to God, our emotions, and next up is our limits. If you’ve read my book and that sounds familiar - these are thoughts I’ve had in the two years since I turned that manuscript in. If you want to catch up, jump in here and read the Tuesday newsletters.
On to this week.
For 24 years, my father held the office of statutory probate judge. He served in law that deals with end-of-life care, guardianships, mental health, and honoring people’s desires as expressed in their will. I share this because I grew up in a home context that did not call things crazy or bipolar or ocd. I learned early on that behind these labels are people struggling to meet and make sense of their daily world.
This made it all the more difficult for me when at 19, I was struggling to meet and make sense of my daily world. I feared I was losing my grip on what was true and what my mind told me was going to happen.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the awareness of a mental health crisis has risen sharply. We started to pay attention to the impact of screen time, social media, and diet, even as we focused on children/teens while adults commented on their fatigue and inability to concentrate. The reclamation of self-care became a mantra for those feeling worn around the edges and fighting back against hustle culture or compulsion.
A few months ago, I spoke with another church staff about mental health, and called the talk: Mental Health, Yours, Ours, and Theirs (subtitle stolen from Steve Cuss’s book). I included the yours, ours, and theirs language because central to our daily work as Christians is regulating ourselves in relation to God, ourselves, and others. It is to engage what is happening within us to engage what happens in others and around us.
It was surprising to me that the dictionary definition of mental health reads with a less sterile diagnosis and more perspective than expected.
Mental Health: A state of emotional and psychological well-being in which an individual is able to use his or her cognitive and emotional capabilities, function in society, and meet the ordinary demands of everyday life.1
After high school, I began to experience what I would later come to know as classic Obsessive Compulsive Disorder tendencies. A thought would intrude my awareness, and I would panic in response. In hopes of escaping the unwanted intrusion, I would focus on rejecting it and defending myself from whatever it told me was going to happen, was wrong with me, or what I needed to do to be okay.
It would take years to realize that defending myself against myself only strengthened fear within me.
To fight these intrusive thoughts, I engaged in compulsions of thought, affirmation, or action. Bible verses, prayer, study, activity, exercise, direct refutation - all of it an internal struggle while externally doing my best to project strength, make friends, and fight to be who I wanted to be seen as by others. I would hunt with my dad and fear I’d hurt him. I’d drive down the road and fear I’d swerve into traffic. For 72 hours at a time for two and a half years, I fought every cycle of thought that came into my brain.
It was a terrible way to spend the first half of college.
I finally asked for help from my parents. It might have been the first time in my adult life that I experienced the kind of receptive grace that took me where I was and did not shame me but offered love and a willingness to help me find the next step.
And so I took one step after another, through counseling, into medication, into health, out of medication, and into the next season of life. I felt like I had tools and awareness of why my brain did what it did, who I was, and who I remained in the middle of it all.
Twenty years on, there are times I am tempted to disown that version of me. Weak, afraid, and compulsively attacking every whisper of doubt or harm. When I had to chart and discuss Turning Points in my life, I did not want to own that a large part of who I have become is in response to the part of me that fears what might have happened. I did not want the shame of the weakness I was made to feel by the lack of control I perceived.
I think about the Lord’s declaration of the greatest commandment and the second one: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37)
It appears that much of the work I have to do is to love myself to love others, and to love myself I have to understand who I am with God, and who I have become as a result of my attempted solutions to find life as I want it. Then, the work of repair is to let the Spirit guide me to repent and rebuild the self and life God wants me to know with Him.
I used the tools I learned in my twenties to, by grace, grow into a different man. When the pandemic hit, everything went into overdrive, and I felt my perspective narrowed to what I could control to meet the demands of everyday life. I became driven by rhythm and predictability, not intrusion or fear. It took a while within and after 2020 to realize that compulsion still drove areas of life and needed befriending.
Last fall, at a conference, in interrupting a meal to say goodbye to a friend, I met their companion, John. When introducing John, my friend commented I should look into his recent work, A Quiet Mind to Suffer With. I shook John’s hand and grabbed my Uber to the airport.
I read John’s book. It brought me to tears time and again. In John’s words, I read words that articulated my lived experience in a way that I had been unable to communicate for the last twenty years. I felt sadness for College Mason, sitting on his couch trying to explain to his parents what felt like walls collapsing, for older Mason sharing bits and pieces with his wife when he reacted irrationally, and for my children when I see them fight their fears in ways I’m afraid mirror my responses from childhood.
“For the longest time, I thought I was the symptoms of my illness, that I was as dark and as horrible as they were. That I was the same as what my brain did, the same as what it showed me. But now I know that those thoughts and feelings are mine only in the sense that I am the one they’re happening to, the one in the Wilderness of what I can be made to feel and see. I’m just the one making my way through what my mind can show me.”2
Some of you will know I’ve quoted John in the Friday Five more than once. While John and I are different people with different experiences, his book made my Everlist because it has helped to shape how I understand and move in the world. It has pointed out significant truths in ways I could (and needed to) hear. The most impactful way in which John’s work has served me is to anchor struggling for the idealized life and making sense of life as it is within the Christian’s personal relationship with Jesus.
The journey into a state of emotional and psychological well-being in which an individual is able to use his or her cognitive and emotional capabilities, function in society, and meet the ordinary demands of everyday life is inherently one in which our brokenness from sin and the need for union with Christ plays a fundamental role. Hear me very clearly: for many, there is a need for medical intervention, counseling, and therapy in different forms. For some, there is a n awareness of a need for deep healing that will be the first step toward health. Amidst all this, we are people for which original sin has broken something fundamental in us, which impacts all of who we are. It is a both and not an either-or.
Below are few conclusions I’m walking with these days. They are thoughts I’m considering as I walk with Jesus, and I’ve included some quotes from John’s work with them. After that are some resources for further study.
What do I need to be okay?
How do I encounter a normal moment in life and think something is wrong, feel like something is wrong, and understand that nothing is wrong?3
It’s a strange but normal occurence for me: that I think and feel that which is wrong, and nothing is wrong. It has shown up at birthday parties, meetings with my boss, my wife’s tone in a question, and a look from a friend. It is an exhausting undercurrent of concern that trusts my thoughts instead of what’s in front of me. Yes, I have great intuition. Yes, I can sense and feel deeply. Yes, my mind has used these things against me.
Over the years, I have needed more than Jesus to be okay. I needed certainty of my own thought, strength of my own will, and from time to time, an admission that I need grace. I have been busy consoling myself so that I would be okay.
Yet, I only need the mercy of Christ. Everything I have, I have been given. I’m told to be grateful for what I have “because He has said, I will never leave you, nor forsake you.” (Heb 13)
What do I need to be okay? A quiet heart so I can receive the mercy of Jesus.
What does it mean to depend upon Christ?
It is to no longer defend myself and thereby depend upon myself. It is to forgo hating who I was as a means to love who I am. It is to realize that Christ is who I need most, more than trust in my own reason.
In the Wilderness of what we can be made to see and feel, of what can be done or taken, we learn what Christ will have to be for us if things are going to be okay, that He will have to be more for us than we ever thought He could or should. And by realizing what we cannot be for ourselves, and what Christ will have to be, we are given a stunning, solemn, reverent fear of who Christ is. A humility that is our way forward, an understanding of the heart that is our place to stand. And we will be led through the Wilderness as that patient, quiet understanding, led into the future by what we understand.4
How should I think about who I was?
John refers to the soul’s anguish, despair, and unbearable dissatisfaction as The Howling Boy. Hear what the Howling One in all of us needs:
The reason we don't want to remember What Happened is simple: we can't stand or possibly deal with the person it happened to. Their distress that can so easily become our distress, their intolerable Suffering that will so easily become ours. The one thing we can't stand about those prior versions of ourselves is the way they can make us feel again. The Howling Boy is all the things I don't want to feel. And I have come here to be with him. He is my exile. An intolerable, unacceptable, inconsolable prior version of myself. And I have come here to be with him…5
…I have come to the Howling Boy bearing this Word of for-giveness. For trying to fix him, get rid of him. Telling him what I know now, that the answer to his Suffering is something only Mercy knows. It is only something Christ can tell him, and something we will both have to wait to hear. I have come to offer him Christ, and to offer Christ as our reconciliation. As the end of our hostility. To the damage he's done to me, to the damage I've done to him. To my hatred of him, my hatred of myself.6
When I talked with the church staff about mental health, I shared that we are all living in a fallen world, and to love others, we must work to see God and ourselves rightly. Then we can love others and not use them for our own means.
As ministers of Christ, we are to love others and help them live in God’s good design. For those who struggle with any type of mental illness, short-term or lifelong, the temptation is to see God, ourselves, and others wrongly. This impairs our way of thinking, feeling, and rightly relating in the world.
I’m sharing my experience with you in hopes of it encouraging a step toward health. The life we want is on the other side of hard, and the hard is the surrender of dependence upon ourselves to be okay. It is to recognize that consoling ourselves is not the objective of daily life—living with Christ is.
If you struggle to meet the demands of daily life, there could be real emotional, physical, and experiential matters to pertain to. I’m a fan of perspective on all of it to help find the right next step.
We can pursue health and remain among the dead. Discipleship to Jesus is the continual surrender of all of life, which includes surrendering your dependence upon yourself and the things outside of Christ that you think you need to be okay.
Below are some resources to consider that deal with anxiety, mental health, healing, and grace.
A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Health, Trauma, and the Death of Christ (John Andrew Bryant)
The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Story We Believe About Ourselves (Curt Thompson)
Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Me Peace (J.P. Moreland)
Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode–and into a Life of Connection and Joy (Aundi Kolber)
Thanks for reading! It means the world to me and always is fun when someone stops me to say - I’ve listened to X or read Y, and now I’m thinking about _____. What a gift to share that with you! Also, if you reply to this email, I will read and respond. I’m here for the conversation.
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I live in Flower Mound, TX, with my wife Carly, our kids, and chocolate lab, Nia Wingfeather King. I pastor, teach, and lead at The Village Church. In my spare time, I’m plodding through a Ph.D. program in Church History, studying Jonathan Edwards and character formation. Also, I’ve written A Short Guide to Spiritual Disciplines: How to Become a Healthy Christian. If you read it, I’d love to hear what resonated or was encouraging.
Have a great week!Mason
https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=mental+health
Bryant, A Quiet Mind to Suffer With, 10.
Bryant, 9.
Bryant, 44
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Bryant, 57.
Love this so much, Mason. So much.
Excellent work.