A (needed) Conversation on Mental Health
This conversational piece with Missio Alliance’s editor Chris Kamalski is the culmination of a series of articles I’ve written this past year. Although I couldn’t have said this before writing them, I see now that these articles have been different kaleidoscopic twists, multi-faceted ways of asking the same question: How do we as individuals navigate the complexities of beauty and suffering, especially within the church? And how do we as the global church show up as a broken-yet-whole community of wounded healers on behalf of the world? I hope this conversation blesses you at least as much as engaging these questions has blessed me. May it open the door wider to bigger and better questions. May fresh breezes of possibility flow over your Spirit. May you know you are not alone—not now, not ever. And may peace embrace you.
But wait! There’s more.
I feel compelled to share this poem by Mary Oliver called “The Uses of Sorrow”:
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Why? Because sometimes the One who loved us into being hands us the equivalent of a box full of darkness. When this happens, what do we do with it? Do we shake it? Let it be? Sit inside of it like we did when we were kids and pretend it’s a car or clubhouse? There are many uses, many gifts, of darkness—one of which is being given the safety and seclusion needed to incubate growth. As I’m coming out of a year that has felt at times consumed by the ravenous jaws of unrelenting depression, I am wondering if the One I love has handed me a box full of darkness—the fertile darkness of lovely, rich, blackest soil in which to sink my roots down and wait for the first dewdrops of dawn to fall. I wonder if this, too, was a gift.