All Christians

I don’t know if we have said enough how much we love The Grace Alliance. (Their Instagram stories is enough of a reason to follow them) One of the big draws I have had to the site is their Training + Leaders section which is made available to you for free, even if you don’t purchase anything from them. Honestly, it’s the best Christian mental health group training I have ever come across.

Not only do they have the videos free, but the page also includes downloadable leader materials with all the details and training slides to give to your volunteers and team as well as free ongoing support through webinars, videos, access to Grace Group Leader Network.

(This is a sponsored post with no restrains or impact on the review.)

The book Sharing Love Abundantly in Special Needs Families is part of the 5 Love Languages that was originally authored by Gary Chapman. This book looks at how parents of children with special needs can incorporate the 5 Love Languages into their parenting model to improve communication between spouses and better love their children.

The original book is a staple for people who want to better communicate with their spouses and has a soft integration of faith within it. From there, Gary has made a whole collection of books including for Children, Teenagers, Men, Women, Singles, and Military Edition.

Grief is a powerful emotion. It disconnects us from reality. It hits us at our very core where we feed the pain of loss and depression at the very heart of who we are. It can impact us out of nowhere in the sudden loss of a friend from a heart attack or a talk at dinner that your parents are divorcing. And you have so little control over grief as it slams into you, wave after wave of overwhelming sadness, frustration, and loneliness.

Yet, we have a community. For those who grieve, we can have hope in our fellow Christians. For those who support and grieve with us well, we will find rest. For us who can be that support, we may be the lighthouse that points people to Jesus as we care and listen to those hurting.

Parenting is hard. It might be the hardest thing you ever have to do. Part of it is keeping that little person alive and raised up to be a good person. But part of it is also that we see our sinful nature reflected in them, our reaction to their not listening, and the need for boundaries which we may never have fully established.

The video below is from Focus on the Family. For those of you who struggle with discipline, maybe because of your own mental health shortcomings or mental illness within the child, I want to encourage you to take some time to watch this four-minute video and I’d love to hear in the comments, how do you create boundaries as a parent or how have you seen boundaries done well with children?

This is not about being politically correct. This is about treating people wholely, beyond any mental illness, impairment, or delay. We need to recognize that words matter.

Words matter with mental illness. Words matter with developmental disabilities. Words matter with substance misuse.

Empathy is the “ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” For many people, we assume this is the same as sympathy, but it truly isn’t. In church, I see people have sympathy for the homeless, the widowed, the orphaned, the mentally ill, the physically injured, the locked up, the abused, and the addicted.

Sympathy is “we’ll pray for you” and then by the time you walk out the church doors you’ve forgotten that commitment. Empathy is being willing to drive that person home, pray for them when they leave, showing up at the homeless shelter to give them supplies, and sit to authentically listen to them weep over their fears and losses six months or a year after the event has happened.

If you have not read our previous post on how a pastor can make a referral for someone to go to counseling and what pastors need to do to help, check out the article here. So you may know how to make a referral, but what should Christians and pastors look for when referring someone to counseling?

Below are the steps you need to know to ask for not only finding a good counselor but one that will also keep your spiritual needs at the forefront of the counseling. Further, we do not go into specifics of the difference between Biblical counseling and having a Christian counselor but will write about that in the future.

Note: this will be useful whether you are going to attend outpatient or inpatient treatment. If this is a crisis situation, call 911, a crisis hotline (1-800-273-8255) or go to the nearest emergency room for immediate assistance.

Jesus heals. We know He does. We see it in the Bible, and we even see it today.

But He doesn’t always heal when we ask Him to.

I’ve been chronically ill since I was eight years old, and you bet I prayed, and still pray, to be healed. People laid hands on me (um, not my favorite), people prayed over me silently, people prayed for me out loud, people prayed for me without me knowing, people I barely knew prayed for me.
I’m just saying that I was and am, prayed for.

And I haven’t been healed.

I’m still chronically ill a decade later.

Barna Group, a Christian-based research group started by David Kinnaman, recently conducted a study on how marriage and parenting impact an individual’s understanding of forgiveness. Per the description of the product, this report covers:

• New data and infographics about prevailing attitudes and practices of mercy and justice in the Church
• An overview of how people define, offer and accept forgiveness in their daily lives
• Gaps between practicing Christians’ and pastors’ perceptions of how churches facilitate hope and healing
• Details about how life stage, generation and political ideology factor into expressions of compassion 

Through personal experience and hearing shared experiences of other people, I have concluded that in most cases of any mental illness, people, and more specifically Christians, don’t know what to say. This comes down to a lot of stigma surrounding overall mental health, in the Church and out, but I’ll save that for another post. I’ll just say that what you do or don’t say to someone can really change their life; the Bible isn’t kidding when it says that the power of death and life are in the tongue.

Below I have compiled a few lists of things that you should and shouldn’t say to someone who has just shared with you their struggle.