Be More Annabel

Close friends, and probably, let’s be honest, casual observers, will know that I typically drag out this blog to analyse whatever total disaster has recently slammed me to the mat and left me picking up the mental health pieces. Hopefully they will therefore be glad that it has gone so long untouched, with those who wish me well interpreting that it is because I’m doing OK.

They would be correct in that assumption. I am thriving, peaceful, happy, embedded in a network of loving, supportive relationships, serving my church and following Christ as best I can. No one’s life is perfect, but compared to the hellscape of my own intransigent emotions that I lived through the first 34 or so years of my life, I’m doing pretty amazing.

And that in fact is why I am picking up my metaphorical pen today. The human person who above all other people who, apart from Christ himself, is responsible for the change I have experienced is retiring this year and I want her, and everybody else, to know what she has done for me and the depths of my gratitude for her and to her.

I know people often say this, but I genuinely mean it, I doubt very much I would be alive today, much less as well as I am if it was not for Annabel Heywood.

Annabel showed me love in the truest, Christlike sense of the word love, beyond sense, reason and some would say wisdom. She loved me when I was deeply unlovable. She loved me when I was dangerous, chaotic, ugly and overwhelming. She loved me when it cost her more than I or most people would believe it was reasonable to pay.

Other people in my journey have loved me well and they know who they are, I hope and how I feel about them. But over 14 years of my life, Annabel allied love, wisdom and courage in the determination that I would not be eaten alive by my demons and by God’s grace, through Christ’s love and with the Spirit’s power, she won.

I first properly met Annabel when I was 21, fleeing from another church where I had created mess and mayhem with my out of control emotions and had just flunked out of my PGCE because, as my mentor said, people with mental health problems can become teachers, but not if they were that bad.

It was around 48 hours after I had trekked through A&E having overdosed on iron tablets and antihistamines (that’s a hilarious combination by the way). I knew I couldn’t go back to the church I had been at and a friend of mine brought me to Ebbe’s that Sunday, walked me up to Annabel and said, “Hi Annabel, this is Helen, she tried to kill herself this week” and walked away. Annabel fished out her diary and said, “Shall we meet up then?”

We went to work, thrashing out my problems, doing Christian CBT, asking what was true, what was real and where was Christ, her eternal question to me, “Where is Jesus in this?” It stabilised my day-to-day, I got on top of the worst of my crushing self-hatred, mostly stopped the chronic self-harm and entirely stopped the nasty self-critical thoughts that had dominated my brain since I was a child.

But it didn’t prevent the terrifying, unpredictable, cliff-edge, death spirals of depression I would swing into over the next 10 years. When those happened we would start meeting regularly again, I would come to the Rectory sitting room, kick of my shoes and curl up on the sofa and we would talk for hours and hours, wading through my pain, trying to make sense of my feelings, trying to see Jesus and always ending in hopeful prayer.

The mental health crash when I was 31 was particularly bad and particularly brutal for the bystanders. And it happened in Annabel’s house. I was lodging with a family who were hitting all my triggers for anxiety hard and I had started to spiral. Hearing, Annabel offered me her spare room for as long as it took to find somewhere safe for me to live. It was a kindness I accepted but I couldn’t deal with. I was already spiralling into being unwell and the idea of being utterly dependent on the grace and kindness of another person was terrifying.

I was desperately insecure, I watched myself in horror as I made myself a burden with my fear of being a burden, constantly worrying that I would reach her limit of grace and find myself on the street. I had half formed plans for going to the homeless shelter when that happened. It was ridiculous in retrospect, it never would have happened, but I wasn’t thinking straight.

It culminated with probably the closest I have ever come to ending my life, by which I mean I was in the process of hanging myself from her bannisters when Jesus spoke to me (a story for another day). I didn’t do it. She was on holiday at the time and I was completely convinced – not without reason, you might think -  that the day she got back and found out what I had almost done I was getting chucked out on my ear.

I remember vividly sitting on the sofa telling her the story of what had happened and waiting for the axe to fall. I waited and waited. She was very interested in talking about what had happened and how to prevent it happening again, but nothing was being said about how I would obviously need to move out immediately. In the end I asked. She looked at me in surprise. It had honestly not occurred to her.

That incident was a breakthrough for me in two ways. It led to me getting a new diagnosis that was immensely helpful for both of us to understand what I was experiencing and to begin to apply gospel healing now that we properly understood the hurt.

But it was a breakthrough in another way. I had gone so far beyond what was acceptable, I had been so immensely difficult and scary and she hadn’t rejected me. I felt really safe, for I think the first time in my life. And things that I had long buried and twisted into unrecognisable shapes began to emerge.

There was sin and ugliness I was able to face and to admit to, because I had no fear of being judged, rejected and found wanting. There were deeply buried hurts that were able to come to the surface because I didn’t have to protect myself anymore, not with Annabel.

It got harder before it got easier, as is the way of things. We had moments of conflict and chaos, moments of I’m pretty sure on her part, utter frustration, as I couldn’t get the words out to talk about how I was feeling, when I couldn’t put things to one side, when they were all consuming and no respecter of other people’s frailty and limitations.

But there were moments of light shining into the darkness, ways the truth of Scripture began to pierce through the maelstrom of emotion. A slow climb out of the valley of death.

Annabel persevered with me when I was ungrateful, when I made progress one day and slid all the way back the next, when I was demanding, difficult, distressing and damaging to everyone around me. She persevered, I happen to know, in the face of people who told her she was wrong to get involved, that someone as unwell as me needed to be left to the ‘experts’. I can never, ever be grateful enough that she ignored them. She persevered when she was probably being told that she was an idiot to do so – although if that is true, she was kind enough not to tell me.

Annabel pioneered Christian Counselling before really any of us knew what that was. She knew that deeply, seriously unwell people need Jesus, that there is no place or part of life, however disordered, chaotic, frightening or not normal that he doesn’t have something to say. She knew that mentally ill people were not exempt from being sinners, that although mental illness isn’t caused by sin, sin informs how we respond as mentally ill people and that we all need to grow in repentance and faith in God’s grace to us.

She didn’t make me ashamed, she showed me how grace could set me free. How love could set me free. How truth could set me free. She showed me Jesus. And it changed me in ways that medical professionals would consider not possible. Or perhaps, the correct way to say it is that he changed me. For then we will become like him, for we will see him as his is.

Because of Annabel, today I was able to welcome a foster child into my home for the first time. Because of Annabel I hope I know how to love them, whatever challenges they bring.

This blogpost will probably thoroughly embarrass Annabel because humility is the first prerequisite to doing anybody any good, but I don’t care. The world needs more Annabels and for that to happen we need to know it’s possible. We need role models and trailblazers. We need people in pastoral ministry who pour themselves out and who truly believe that Jesus is the answer.

So, in this year that she retires, here is my challenge to you, reading this now. Be more Annabel.

The Necessity of Hope

“It gets better.” Twice recently I have been challenged on this statement. I understand why. When you live with a condition or life circumstance that causes you chronic pain and suffering at best this can sound like a glib, easy response from others who don’t understand the perseverance and depth of your pain, allowing them to feel better, at worst it can sound like a dismissal of your experience, a minimising of the extent of your suffering. Attempts to bless can become a curse so easily in the mouth of someone who has not taken the time to truly listen and try to understand your pain.

The challenge to “it gets better,” is a challenge from a place of pain and deserves a tender and thoughtful response. For sufferers of long-term, chronic pain, mental or physical, false hope can feel like a bitter lie, a glass of water just outside of your reach in the desert, a callous reminder of there being no escape for you although there is for others, a fearful warning that the patience of others may one day expire, even at times a condemnation of your failure to get better.

However, in spite or even because of this I will defend hope to my last breath and without compromise. I will give 3 reasons why I believe whoever we are and whatever we face we can in some measure appropriate “it gets better” for ourselves and then explain why I think it is absolutely essential that we do.

1. Your suffering will not always be this bad. Miley Cyrus was on the radio today talking about her new single and one of the lyrics in it that means the most to her. She talks about the way that we torment ourselves with forever. Almost everyone with a chronic condition, or even a deteriorating one, has times of better and worse. Even if better lasts a day, or an hour or a minute, there are moments that are slightly less horrendous. And at the moment when the pain is so bad it feels unendurable, hope says, it will not always be like this. This may return, it may even get worse, but it will not always feel exactly like this. 

Even if it is temporary, even if it is incomplete, there will be a break in the clouds, a breath of fresh air, a candle in the darkness, a moment of peace. And, in particular, the situation that feels right now like a car crash catastrophe that is all you can see or think about will certainly not always feel like this. Everything changes. Nothing in this life is permanent, and if that is true for good things that we cannot hang on to, it is also true for the awful things we fear we can never escape. 

Can I say just how important this is to believe and hold onto for people with BPD. We who experience BPD are so prone to black and white thinking. Pain creates a tunnel of darkness that seems to be without end. It is so easy to believe that how I feel right now is all I have ever felt and all I will ever feel. But it isn’t. Good days happen. Good weeks even. With help we can escape from situations that trigger us and there are people out there who will show us the love and kindness that we crave, even just for a moment. It gets better does not mean it gets perfect or it never gets worse again. But it does mean it gets better than this.

2. There is always hope for change. Although BPD can often be used as a punishment diagnosis or feel like an excuse to chuck people into the scrap bin, condemning them to a lifetime of untreatable anguish and inability to function, this is not true. The Bible insists that while we are not guaranteed healing from any or all diseases and damage, over time - and sometimes a very, very long time - the way we experience suffering can be transformed. The pain may never get better, but I can find purpose in it, comfort. 

And most importantly, to the extent that my suffering is exacerbated by my own sinful responses to it – something that is true of every single person who has ever lived apart from Jesus – as I learn to walk with the Lord, to ask him to show me my hidden faults, to believe his truth over the lies of my heart and mind and the lies of the world and others, to renounce the idols I am living for which fail me so relentlessly and cause me such pain in the failure, it can and will get better. God is in the business of changing all of us. Having BPD does not exempt us. We may always face crisis, panic, pain, brokenness, but we are not condemned to being stuck in the same place forever. The Holy Spirit is at work. It can get better. 

3. There is eternal hope. One day he will wipe every tear from our eye, we will be his people, he will be our God, we will live in perfect, unbroken relationship with our bodies, other people and the Lord. Because of the Lord Jesus’ work for us on the cross, our eternal hope is secure and unyielding. One day there will be no more pain, no more brokenness, no more heartbreak, no more struggle. There will be perfect rest, perfect peace, perfect wholeness. We will be exactly who we were made to be and we will experience perfect love as we meet face to face with our Lord. 

Even if pain in this life was constant and without hope of change, we can persevere, knowing something better is coming and it will redeem every drop of agony we sweat and transform it through God’s incomparable goodness into blessing. In the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a character lives by the motto, “It will be OK in the end. If it is not OK, it is not the end.” The transforming, joyful, hope-drenched truth of the gospel is that this aphorism is true. In the end it will indeed be OK. Before the throne of the lamb, surrounded by the presence of the Lord it will be better.

So why do I insist upon hope? Why will I not compromise on “it gets better”?

Firstly, because I know the power of it in my own life. The older I get the better I get at enduring pain simply because I have learned to remind myself that it gets better. It may take an hour, or a week or a year or a decade, but things immediately become less unendurable as soon as they have the hope of an end.

Secondly, because if we believe it gets better, we act in ways that make it better. Telling ourselves “always” and “forever” tend to cut off attempts to improve our situation. What is the point? There’s no hope. And yet, when we let hope push us to keep trying, trying once more to trust someone, once more to put yourself out there, once more to cast your cares on the Lord, once more to cry out to him in prayer for relief, one more counsellor, one more treatment, one more leap of faith, it is in the trying that the capacity for better happens.

Thirdly, whenever the Bible talks about how we endure suffering it talks about hope. In fact, I would argue that there is no way to endure suffering in a way that can have meaning or dignity or purpose without hope. There is no way to persevere in suffering as a Christian without the firm knowledge that it gets better. Christ has died for us and has secured our place in heaven, so as we run through the difficulties of this life, we run for a prize that can never perish, spoil or fade. We cannot be separated from the love of Christ, he has overcome every possible power in heaven and on earth than can separate us from him, even our own sin and God’s own wrath. He intercedes for us, God’s own precious son, pleads his own precious blood on our behalf. He gives us his Spirit to transform us more and more into the likeness of the Lord, promising change as we seek and submit to him. The Bible points us relentlessly to hope, because we are creatures of hope. We cannot endure this life without it. But with it, our experience of suffering becomes transformed.

The Lord Jesus endured the worst suffering we can imagine. He was slandered, misunderstood, dismissed, betrayed by those he loved the most, beaten, mocked, humiliated, shamed, homeless, hungry, condemned and murdered and the wrath of God was poured out upon him in our place, his eternal relationship of perfect love was broken through no fault of his own. How did he endure? How was he able to persevere in obedience to the Father? Hebrews tells us, “for the joy set before him”. Because of hope.

Despair lives in the darkness. Despair holds us in the darkness. But despair is a lie of the devil. However hard it can be to believe it, however painful hope can be, ultimately despair does not win. God is in the business of hope. However dark it seems right now, I stand by my statement, I insist on it, I will believe it for you when the dark gets too overwhelming and you can’t. If you trust the Lord, you are not condemned to suffer indefinitely. It might not be on the timescale we prefer or the way we want it. But absolutely, unequivocally, indisputably, I will fight to be dying breath to affirm, “it gets better”.

Failing Well

Last year I failed. What’s more, ever since I have been carrying around the feeling, wrapped up tight in a little packet of anger, that God failed me. I reached the end of my strength, the end of myself and I turned to him and he didn’t show up. He let me fail. Heck, he set me up to fail. Those are my true and honest feelings. I feel let down. Betrayed. And because he let me down I ended up battered and bruised and gingerly picking myself up off the floor. I lost things and people I love. And I left other people bruised and battered too.

I failed and it was calamitous. I failed and it smashed my life to pieces. I failed and all of the doors that had opened up to use my gifts to serve God in a way I had hoped and dreamed of for years came shuttering down. Called to surrender all of my ambitions, hopes and plans again not because of any external circumstance but because of weakness, inadequacy, lack within me. Because I failed.

Cast back out into limbo, into the place of questions, what should I even be doing with my life? Should I pursue the calling I feel so intensely it’s more of a demand, when whatever I try to do falls apart, is snatched away. When I meet failure over and over again. Should I give up? Settle for not selling out for the gospel, for a life more ordinary.

Several people, non-Christians, have said to me recently, yes sure, that thing, that needs doing, someone should do that, but not you. You are too fragile, too unstable, too vulnerable. Let someone else take the risk, someone else carry the burden. Retreat to where it’s safe. And I wonder, are they right? Is that what God is trying to tell me? Stop seeking out the least and the lost with the good news of the gospel, stop giving everything you have away because it breaks your heart to see all the people who have even less than you. That’s for other people, not you. You are too weak, too riddled with sin, too broken. All you do is fail and lose and fail and lose and what good does that do anyone? And if God wanted you to do these things, why does he let you fail and fall and kick around in the dirt? Why does he give you this compassion and empathy and passion for communicating the gospel with one hand and such weaknesses so that they are next to impossible to use with the other? What do you have to offer when the best you ever have to offer is a job half done and usually a mess left behind?

The place of failure is a place of questions. Questions for yourself and questions for God. I can’t answer all of my questions. I don’t honestly know what God wants from me. I don’t know if my indwelling sin and brokenness disqualifies me from doing anything good or lasting or worthwhile with the gifts and desires God has given me to serve him and to love others. If the mixed motives behind the desires themselves, the piece that wants others to admire me, the piece that wants praise of man, the piece that wants to define myself by my good deeds, my self-righteousness, means that there is anything good left in the things that I do because I want to honour and obey, because I want to love as Jesus has loved me. Do I fail because I bring nothing but my own desire for glory, so God never honours my efforts or uses them to glorify himself and bless others? And if that is true, why won’t he fix it? I can’t. And do I just stop trying until he does?

Looking inside there are no answers, only more questions. But even when I’m so mad at him I could spit, God’s grace doesn’t stop and his voice isn’t silent. And as I’ve tuned in to listen again a little, set aside my toddler tantrum and my sniffy fit of pique, here are some of the things he has been saying to me.

1.       I don’t need you.

One of the frustrations of having to walk away is the thought of things left undone. Of the people you left behind, the shattered relationships, the promise unfulfilled. The frustration of the ways you might have shared and helped and discipled others, the work still left to do but in which you no longer are able to take a part. The harvest field ripe and the workers one man short.

There are many answers to this feeling. One is simple, you are not indispensable. God closed that door, you have no control over its opening. Well, he is the God who can cause the stones to cry out, he can make a donkey speak his word if he chooses. He doesn’t need you. 

2.       I care more than you do.

The people he gave you to love, who you have next to abandoned because of the gate slammed shut behind you, they don’t belong to you. You might worry for them and their well-being, but like Jonah, you did not plant the seed or make it grow. God did that. They are his, the work is his. You are angry because God has taken away the work he gave you, well it was never yours. He lent it to you for a time in trust, now he demands it back. He loves them more than you do. He will provide for them. Surrender cheerfully into safer hands than yours, he cares more than you do.  

3.       I want your obedience not your success.

I was in a seminar where this was said recently and grabbed me by the guts. My ideas about failure and God’s are not the same. I sought to obey God with every ounce of strength that I had. To trust his word, to seek his presence, his truth about me, to listen to him over the voice of my fear. I failed, crashed and burned. But I strained to abide with every ounce of strength I had, with every resource I was given. And I have been angry because God ‘didn’t show up’, as if he wasn’t there, all that time. Of course he was, he was there, he just didn’t give me what I wanted. Because what I wanted was not to fail. To defeat my sin of fear, to fix the mess and to keep the life I loved.

But that wasn’t the success he was looking for in that situation. He was looking for the success that comes in failing well. In clinging to him through the storm, in surrendering everything you have and everything you want to do for him, in obedience to him. In accepting that when he doesn’t answer your prayer it isn’t because he doesn’t hear or doesn’t care but because he has decided that it is his good timing to move you on and he wants you to count it all loss for his sake. He wanted me to surrender of all my good things to him, the only truly good thing I have and he wasn’t willing to grant his peace and power over my sin of fear until I had given them up to him.

I have not been gracious in my surrender. I was stubborn, reluctant to let go. I have resented the price exacted. I have been angry with the people who failed to help me. I have seen only the failure and not the obedience demanded. I repent of that. I could not have done anything different to change the outcome of what happened. God is sovereign, he gave none of us the strength, the wisdom, the grace to deal differently with the situation, in a way that would have avoided the mess and the loss; therefore he required the sacrifice of me, the faith to say, “Thy will be done”, to give it all up to him and walk away.

He requires that same obedience now, obedience in the face of my fear of loss, when he wants me to pick up my broken tools and climb off the floor with my painful bruises and start again, knowing that whatever and whoever I may invest in loving and serving, he may at any moment require the surrender of it or them. The obedience to put myself under the authority of the church leadership by investing in serving my church, knowing that the situation may repeat and the demon of fear of authority might return, that God may allow the loss of another family, another place of belonging.

I have no promise in this life of overcoming my sin and brokenness, of becoming immune to the risk of abrupt loss of all I love because I cannot overcome my fear, of ceasing to be at the mercy of the wisdom and insight of those in authority over me. As long as I choose obedience, that is to trust and follow him, I choose risk of failure.

But as long as I choose obedience I also enter into the great and precious promises of Romans 8. Nothing is wasted, in all things he will work together to conform us to the likeness of Jesus; and he will not leave me, I have his love and nothing in this world or the next can steal that from me.

My life may look like one of constant and repeated failure but the yardstick of the world is not the yardstick of God. In his hands, failure becomes just another means of grace and another part of the journey to glory.

4.       Give thanks for your suffering.

Today’s lesson and perhaps the hardest of them all. I had a sin of fear of man that I could not defeat, by any means of grace given to me. I had a sin of fear of man it pleased God not to defeat until it had robbed me of many things that brought me joy in my life. I had a sin of fear of man which led to loss and pain and failure and defeat.

But had that sin been more easily overcome, I might not have seen it in all its depths of ugly, dangerous, destructive and overwhelming power. And I would not have had the knowledge, that such a sin as that lives in my heart, and from such sins as that have I been forgiven, and from such sins as that will I one day be delivered.

Conviction of sin is a blessing, conviction of our powerless before sin is grace, conviction of our need of Christ’s atoning death to crush the power of sin within us is mercy. Revelation of our helpless, abject failure before our sin is a mercy for which we can give thanks, for she who is forgiven much loves much. Each time God enlarges my view of my sin and allows me to be overthrown and fail before its power is an opportunity to understand better his grace and to love him more.

Further than humbly accepting his purpose and plan and my non-indispensable-ness, beyond cheerful surrender of all my good things and accepting the risk of failure as the price of obedience, God wants me to so orientate my view that my defeat and failure results not in anger, resentment and bitterness against him but rejoicing and thanksgiving. For to me as a Christian, revelation of my sin and its power is only a greater revelation of Christ’s goodness, mercy and power seen through his death to forgive and overthrow that sin within me.

“For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— ¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

¹² Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. ¹³ Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

How to help the suicidal

A friend of mine has helped me by excellent example of their behaviour to me to formulate a template for what to helpfully say and do with someone in mental health crisis.

1. I love you and Jesus loves you
2. You matter to me and to God, it’s important to me that you are safe
3. This isn’t your fault
4. I know you are trying your best
5. This is going to get better

I have found this a really helpful formula to teach friends to say to me when I am in crisis and have found it effective to say to others in crisis.

If you take away nothing else from this blogpost, I will be happy. But below I have spelled out a bit more in detail what some of these things could look like in practice for church and church family.

Please don’t do that. It would make me sad.

This is the most glaringly obvious thing that most people don’t do. I understand why they don’t. Suicide is scary. It is scary to think that someone could make the decision to live or die based on not wanting to hurt you. It is scary to think that someone may die if you say the wrong thing. You don’t want to seem to be panicking or judging them or doing anything that would push them ‘over the edge’. It seems right to be calm, neutral, to give them space to make good decisions for themselves. So people are falsely calm, they act like it is no big deal. Although this may be better than panic and judgement it also sends a really dangerous message to the person in crisis. That message is, I really don’t care that you are suicidal, I’m kind of OK with you hurting yourself.

It forgets that we are relational people, that someone in crisis is not operating under any kind of logical conditions and that they are fighting the screaming voices that tell them that they are worthless and useless and everyone would be better off if they were dead. You can join those voices or contradict them. I’m going to tell you something that will probably scare you. The biggest challenges to my self-harming behaviour have not come from people calmly accepting it, they have come from people saying, don’t do that, it makes me sad. I stopped cutting because someone in my life was brave enough to say that and keep saying it.

Cutting was an expression of my feeling that I was evil and disgusting and toxic and deserved to be punished, needed to be defaced. It was an act of self-degradation to make the outside match the feelings on the inside more than anything else. And my friend said to me, don’t do that. It’s not OK. Not because you are bad for doing it, as other people said or implied, because it is a sign you are a bad person trying to manipulate others (simply and utterly untrue) but because Jesus tells me you are precious and lovely and that is not how you treat something precious and lovely. You protect it, you don’t damage it. She wanted me to stop cutting because it hurt her to see me damaging something precious. And her sense that I was precious because God said so became my sense that I was precious, firstly because she said so, then learning from that human example what it meant and felt like that God said so.

And that is something to understand. We are mediators of God’s grace to one another. We are not God and we are not Saviour, but the way in which we express our love and value for one another can teach us, in fact does teach us what it means that God loves and values us. That is the meaning of family and church as family. Most people (not all) with mental illness never grew up with that. They didn’t have family that taught them that they were precious and lovable. So they struggle to understand what it means that God loves them and calls them precious to him. Church family, slowly, painfully, patiently, faltering but persistently can re-teach that lesson. It’s about the only thing that can, it being God’s means of grace for that purpose.

The response to insecurity, to suicidality, to neediness is not to pull away but to go in closer, to increase intimacy, to commit and commit and commit until they start to believe that you are not going to abandon or reject them, and understand what it means that they have a God who won’t abandon or reject them because they are ugly or dangerous or damaged or evil or anything. Like anything that means anything in the Christian life, loving the very broken is both incredibly sacrificial and profoundly transformative for both parties to the relationship. You may feel completely out of your depth, afraid to say something wrong, but if that leads you to push someone away ‘for their own good’ you are going in the wrong direction. All they will learn from that is that someone else has rejected them, has found them not good enough, too broken, too sinful, too ugly. The people who have helped me most effectively to know Jesus have heard me say, you hurt me and now I want to die and have responded by pulling me in closer and telling me that they love me.

I didn’t start to look at many of my deep hurts until someone loved me so radically that I truly believed I could trust them. Until they had such unbelievable grace for my brokenness that I had to believe they were on my side. That gave me a space where I felt safe to have the courage to really look at my own mess and sin and not be rejected for it. Not everyone can do that, but we are all called to give to one another what we can. And the very least we can give is the assurance to someone that they matter, that the world will be a poorer place without them, if for no other reason than the fact they are God’s child. That we do in fact see them as God sees them, as precious and lovable because they are valued and loved by him.

I have always lurched into suicidal thinking when experiencing emotional pain and panic, but for the first time that reaction is becoming seriously undermined although not yet completely stopped. And that is because several people have started saying, please don’t do that, it would make me sad. One person has always said that to me. But one voice can be ignored as an outlier, two is louder, three is a shout that starts to rival the lying voices in your head. One time Jesus spoke to me directly on the verge of a very serious suicide attempt and said, don’t do that it would make me sad. It stopped me. But lately that same message has been spoken into the fog and confusion of mental health crisis by his people, with the same effect.

You should get some medical help sounds like a rejection, a ‘go away and be someone else’s problem’ statement. Suicidal people leave behind their pain for others to bear is a condemnatory statement that never feels true in the moment of crisis (no one will actually care that much if I die is a necessary pre-condition to suicidal thinking). It is a guilt trip. Don’t do that, it would make me sad, is a statement of relationship, of love. It can’t stop the pain but it can reduce it by challenging the lies and it can guard the passes against suicide as a pathway out of it.

I am keeping my phone on through the night because I want you to call me if you are going to hurt yourself.

You may be anxious about this, you may need your sleep and there may be individuals who will take advantage of this in distress for what feels to you like trivial reasons, or excessively because they are not self-aware in their consuming distress of their impact on you, but with the right people this can be an incredible act of protection. There are 2 people who as thoughtful adults have done this for me. Number of times I have used their offer = 0; Number of times it has been a protective factor to help me cling on to not hurting myself in the middle of a long, dark, painful night = dozens; number of times the thought of it has stopped me in the middle of actively and seriously attempting to take my own life = 1. Those stats seem to work for them as being worth the inconvenience.

Can I come and get you? Do you want to come over? Can I come and stay with you until you feel safe?

This is another one that could seem scary. It doesn’t feel safe to invite a suicidal person into your house. It may be inconvenient, you may have kids and be concerned about their welfare. And of course there may be times you need alone time or family time or it feels too stressful and too much pressure and you just can’t do it. You are not the Saviour and ultimately pointing to your own weakness and inadequacy to keep someone safe, whilst pointing to his can be very helpful.

But the reality is that a safe place is what I need the most when I am suicidal. There are a number of reasons why the home of a friend is the safest possible place to be. Firstly, suicidality is a place of hyper-stress and adrenaline. It is a place of terror. Imagine being in a room with a mad-axe-murderer. Then imagine that that there is no possible means of escape. Your life is in danger and you are trapped with the person endangering it. For your rational mind, this is a place of ultimate fear. This keeps your adrenaline flowing and your amygdala (fear centre) in a state of hyper-arousal and stops you from thinking rationally and self-calming. The thought of killing yourself becomes a stimulus so great it stops you from being able to manage it and the state of panic escalates until suicide seems both the problem and the answer because it will at least end this unbearable state of panic and pain. Being in a safe place, a place where you feel people want to protect you, allows the de-escalation process to begin.

Now ideally, a lot of people would like this to be a medical facility. Suicidality is so scary, the fear you will say something wrong and provoke someone stops a lot of people from offering to help. Better to let the professionals deal with it. There are two reasons this reasoning is faulty. Firstly, although medical services can serve as a safe place for de-escalation and in fact should be sought in the last resort, our mental health system is utterly broken. Emergency mental health facilities are rubbish, you are frequently left for hours in unsecure places like waiting rooms, or A&E, non-mental-health staff can treat you like a bed-blocking waste of space, these spaces are inherently stressful places to be and you are in such a state of panic if you encounter a person who seems to indicate you are a problem and they wish you would go away that feels like a confirmation that you are wrong to seek help and may lead to impulsive behaviour.

Secondly, chances are if you are suicidal you are exhausted. Sleep and mental health crisis have a complex chicken-and-egg relationship. Sleeping poorly leads to an increase risk in crisis, in fact is a necessary condition for it, but crisis puts you in a state of adrenaline which makes sleep next to impossible at all. This becomes circular. But the effect is that when you are in crisis you are fairly inevitably exhausted. The idea of sitting for 8 -12 hours in A&E trying to calm down is overwhelmingly unattractive. If there is no other possibility and it will keep you safe you may go there, but it is always hard to believe anything will make you feel better (although you know it will really) and it is the path of least resistance to lie in bed and think about killing yourself. A friend’s house usually has a bed where you can lie down and feel safe at the same time, allowing de-escalation but without costing too much effort. You are more likely to want to do it, so more likely to seek help from that source.

Thirdly and probably most significantly, in order to be seriously suicidal you have to believe that your life is worthless, that everyone would be better off if you died, that you are a toxic burden on the world. Your brain is telling you this. Screaming it at you in fact. When someone says, I care that you are safe, come here and I will try and protect you, that speaks very powerfully to the scream in your brain. It is true that you can’t stop someone from committing suicide who has absolutely decided to do it, but by saying ‘can I come and get you? Or do you want to come over? You immediately introduce a protective factor, even if you aren’t taken up on the offer. It says quite simply and without fuss a whole load of things the suicidal person needs to hear to bear their pain. I care, you matter, I understand. Even if you aren’t able to invite someone over, saying that you wish you could but explaining why you can’t because of your limitations or other commitments can in itself be very protective. Medical professionals are paid to help you stay safe, a friend’s voice provides a counterpoint of truth against the screaming lies much louder and deeper and calmer than the voice of someone you don’t know.

And a corollary to all this is that you don’t actually need to be afraid to invite a suicidal person to your house. It is not tantamount to offering suicide watch, you can go out and leave them, you don’t need to be afraid for your children. Most suicidal people are trustworthy. They won’t want to hurt you or your kids when you have shown them love. I physically cannot hurt myself in a house with children, it overrides every other consideration even in the deepest place of crisis. But mostly, just by inviting them you have probably de-escalated the situation to the point that suicide or self-harm is a far less likely outcome. You have provided a place of safe de-escalation, an affirmation of care to speak against the lie of worthlessness that drives suicidal thinking and offered a place of rest for those processes to take effect.

I can see that you are hurting, it makes sense that you feel that way.

A suicidal person is irrational. Pretty much always. They are scared, in terrific pain or numb because they have shut down the pain and with it all emotion. They are confused, because they are flooded with stress chemicals. Arguing with them, challenging their negative thoughts, words or actions about others is probably not going to lead to any good right now. There is one piece of advice for those that work with people with BPD which is very counterintuitive but incredibly important. People with BPD feel the discrepancy between the stimulus and their emotional reactions and they fight their emotions, hide them, feel ashamed of them and fear them. That leads to a heightening of stress and self-judgement and shame which feeds the emotions themselves and maintains the state of crisis.

The first and necessary pre-condition of de-escalating those emotions is acceptance of them as a real, valid and reasonable response to the stimulus. It’s super counterintuitive. It seems that rationalising and arguing against the excessive emotional response is the right way to help reduce it, but that is exactly what they have been trying and failing to do and they are exhausted by it. If you join in it adds your voice of judgement of the emotions to their own. It validates the feeling that they are bad because their emotions are bad. Instead if you validate the emotions themselves the pressure suddenly lifts. The vicious cycle stops. This is how I feel and it is OK. And relax. Now I can actually start to look at the emotions themselves. I can start to apply rationality, justice, proportion, love. All those higher brain functions that get swamped out by the pain caused by the shame and hatred of the emotions themselves.

The mentally ill in church: you are in control, but I am here to support you to make good decisions.

People with severe mental health crisis have lost control of their mind and their behaviour. That makes them feel ashamed and very afraid. It is very tempting to step in and start to attempt to re-establish that control for them. To share their personal information with others ‘so they can better help’, to restrict their activities to ones you feel are safe and low stress, to protect others that you perceive to be vulnerable from them, to protect them from things that you fear might trigger them. The effect of all of these things however, if not handled extremely carefully is to further increase their sense of shame and lack of control. They feel toxic, dangerous, and you are subtly reinforcing this message. They feel ashamed and like their ability to control what other’s think of them is impaired – unable to hide and that others will see what they see - and again you can easily reinforce that message.

People in crisis need autonomy, as far as it is possible to give. And where it is not possible they need very, very clear explanation of the motivation. That means that if you want to talk to someone about them to help them you should ask them first what it is OK for you to say and not to say. If you are concerned someone or something is unhelpful you should talk to them about it but leave them to make the final decision and where you really believe that is not possible for their safety or for others, in extremis, explain that keeping them safe is the motivation for your action.

Really listen, things that may seem likely to you to be stressors, may in fact be protective factors. And be prepared to believe that what looks from the outside like bad and sinful behaviour may in fact be motivated by things that you can’t understand or sincerely repented of although it may not appear so because they may trust God’s forgiveness but fear your condemnation. Avoid statements that imply judgement with someone in crisis. They are already ashamed and they will hear condemnation very easily. There may be sin that needs to be addressed but now is not the time, both because you may be wrong that it exists and because they are in no place to address it right now.

Be quick to listen, humble to believe you have misunderstood and change your decision, slow to act unless there is an obvious and direct risk of harm. Counterintuitively, the harm of overdoing things for someone in mental health crisis is probably far less than the risk of driving them away from church by shaming them. Before you rush to judgement and church discipline on sin, be careful to ask non-judgemental questions to find out the motivation for the behaviour and whether it is repented of, remembering that repentance may be present but concealed because of shame. So be patient in trying to find it out. Remember that someone in mental health crisis has lost the ability to hide, has lost control. Their sin is obvious and exposed but that doesn’t make it worse than yours or any less repented of than the secret sins that you conceal so effectively behind a barrier of niceness.

You may feel responsible to protect other congregation members from the ‘harm’ of being exposed or having to deal with a person in distress. I can’t see any Biblical warrant for this unless there is abuse. You can support people and empower them to understand their own limitations and not to attempt to be a Saviour but I can’t see that anyone’s role is to protect us from loving one another in costly and painful and difficult ways. In fact, I think it is to facilitate that. You might find a person’s problems complex and overwhelming but that doesn’t mean that a seemingly fragile person, who may in fact have much greater understanding than you do, will. Or that the process of being overwhelmed and finding a situation challenging may not be what God intends for that person to learn to depend more on him.

Don’t underestimate the power of believing that someone will do the right thing. Someone in mental health crisis may be writing a script for themselves where they are a failure who will inevitably fail, hurt people and cause a mess. They’re behaviour may look messy and destructive, but usually they desperately want to do the right thing and are trying with all their energy to fight their chaotic and harmful behaviour. Tell them you believe that. It will challenge their script, actively lift their shame instead of adding to it. Make them part of the conversation about how to support them and how to support and love people who support them. They care about those people profoundly. They don’t want to hurt them. Help them to be the person who loves others in Christ by expecting them to.

Conclusion

This may feel like a radical call to action to the church, and it is meant to. It may feel like something that will pull you way out of your comfort zone, and it is meant to. The church is different to the world in that the last are first and the first are last, the least in the kingdom are the greatest and we are all accountable for how we treat the least of these. The mentally ill, like the refugees are without honour in our society and the church should be a place that welcomes them, not as I see with heartbreak all too often, drives them out through ignorance and lack of understanding.

We are not the Saviour. We are weak and limited. But we can be driven less by fear and more by faith, less by judgement and more by grace, less by self-protection and more by radical, sacrificial love for one another. More often than not our hearts are the problem not our resources.

Identity Snakes and Ladders

Right now life reminds me of a board game of snakes and ladders that we had when I was a child. 12 years ago I started out at the bottom of the pit. I had failed at the game of life. I hated and despised myself, I had no church, no friends, no job, no emotional control and every day I was in such pain I longed for death. Then I met someone who started to teach me that I was not who I thought I was. 

Identity is a key issue for people with BPD. The complete lack of a sense of self, of your own secure identity, and therefore a tendency to see yourself entirely through the lens of what others say about you and what you think they are thinking about you is one of the common features of the condition. 12 years ago I saw myself entirely through other people's eyes, usually determined by a highly skewed interpretation of their behaviour towards me and I was filled with toxic shame. I hated myself with a passion and I was filled with a longing to destroy what I loathed and despised. That self-destructive longing is still visible uncomfortably clearly on my skin. I hated myself, more than anything for my lack of emotional control and the fact that I was unworthy of love or kindness. I believed I was evil scum and I punished myself accordingly.

Then someone came into my life who, first persuaded me to trust them enough to begin to admit to them the way I saw myself - no small feat as admitting you see yourself as disgusting to someone else gives them a lot of power - but also to challenge this way that I constructed my identity. I began to learn that the people to whom I was giving power to define me should not in fact have that power. That only one person was entitled and worthy to tell me who I was, and that was the Lord Jesus. It was his right by right of creation, of love and of conquest. He had made me, he had loved me to the point of sacrificing his life for me, and he had risen victorious over death and Satan, redeeming that which was already his own back entirely to himself to call his own entirely and absolutely. To allow myself to be defined by anyone other than the Lord Jesus was to deny him that which was rightfully his. My identity did not belong to anyone else and least of all to me. 

That was the beginning of my snakes and ladders journey, the quest to learn a new identity shaped not by the way others treated me but by Christ's words about me. Roll the dice and move, sometimes you hit a ladder and seem to skip over several sections of road, sometimes you hit a snake and go sliding back many spaces and find yourself despairingly recovering ground that you felt you had already won. 

In common with many versions of the snakes and ladders board game, the one we played as children had a nasty feature. A huge, vicious snake that sat on the 99th square out of 100. You were so close to winning the game, roll a 6 and you have won. But roll a 5 and you hit this snake which takes you all the way back down to the first square on the board, all your gains are lost and you must start again on your journey. This year, in my quest to define myself by Christ's words I feel right now like I have hit this snake. I had learned so much, leaped up so many ladders, I felt so close to having a life unweighed down by the burdens of other people's opinion. I could taste and see freedom coming. And then I hit the snake and down I have fallen, back, back, back to the beginning of the game again. Back in the same welter and mess and mire that I started with, utterly submerged by the fear of other people's judgement. 

I have felt this intensely, but it is a vastly imperfect analogy I am beginning to be aware. For a start, my feeling of closeness to victory was probably illusory. I thought the game went up to 100, but actually it goes on beyond, to 1000 at least, in the great scheme of the game, the fall is less catastrophic than it seems. There are vast freedoms to be attained beyond the one I thought I could taste. Secondly, however intensely I feel I have slid all the way back 12 years to the bottom of the board, that feeling too is an illusion. I have been set back, no doubt, I have met a situation that was able to utterly overwhelm my new identity in Christ and put me back into the power of defining myself through the eyes of others, but the foundations of my new identity that I have laboured alongside Christ to build, defined by what he sees when he looks at me, may have been temporarily obscured by a tsunami of shame and fear but they are not destroyed. As the wave ebbs, they will emerge, needing repair, restoration, but by no means reconstruction. I may have been swept down the board by means of a giant snake but the game I am playing has changed, there are fewer snakes, more ladders and the dice is weighted towards the higher numbers.  

That said, there is a reality to the feeling I have lost. From a place of feeling secure in my identity and a profound sense of contentment that came from that, I have encountered a situation where the truth that I know and have felt deeply of my identity in Christ stands in disconnect from the emotions of shame and fear I have and am experiencing from seeing myself through others' eyes. The identity that had been built and had started to stand firm against many storms has succumbed to a hurricane, or rather, it is still there, but I have been caught out and cannot seem to get back to its shelter until the storm abates. And the effect has been losing once again, it seems, my job, my church, my emotional control and being plunged back into a world where the only prayer I can find the strength to utter is "Help me Lord, or let me die." 

Additionally, I am haunted by the question which sits in the background of deep suffering for most of us. The unanswerable question. The most painful question of all because it cuts to the heart of the relationship we need the most when we are enduring the unbearable. The question, of course is Why? Why Lord? Why when I have come so far can I be cast back to the very start? Why when I was finding happiness in living for you do I find that destroyed? Why when I had felt a sense of love and belonging and family among your people, that was based on a freedom to love rather than a desire to be needed, has that been wrenched away by the javelin of shame finding the gap in my armour? And even more pernicious, what is the point of me trying to do anything if I find myself dashed against the walls of my own weakness and starting again from scratch so often that I never feel I manage to actually achieve anything meaningful? It feels so pointless, so painful. 

Instead of being a blessing, I have once again become a burden on my friends, my cries to the Lord to help me believe what he says about me over what I hear from other people in my emotions seemingly unheard and I am storm-wrecked even to the point of death. Because the temptation to take into my own hands the only means I can think of to stop the fear and the pain sits with me every day, and sometimes my rational mind is so overwhelmed by panic and pain that the temptation becomes almost a compulsion. 

Despair sits very close, the despair of feeling that there is no point to me being in this world. That I long to serve the Lord but every good intention is thwarted, every bright start ends in dark failure, every hope shattered by my weakness and failure to be the person that I want to be, that I long to be. I can do nothing because every good intention is undercut, undermined by this fatal weakness, the failure to make my emotions bend to the will of my rational mind or come into line with the truth that I know. My dependence on the understanding and grace of others to be able to say the right thing at moments of stress and crisis, without which the emotional hurricane is unleashed which overwhelms rational control. My powerlessness to control my emotional reactions to certain stimuli or to persuade others of how to help or at the very least how not to hurt. And added to this, the cloying shame of failure. Of seeing the person I should be, that I want to be, the faith I want to have and knowing that however much I want to blame others, it is my weakness and inadequacy that causes the problem. I am too weak and too broken to do any real good in the world, to use the gifts that Jesus has given me for his kingdom. My own ingrained sin poisons every attempt and all my prayers for redemption from it seem to fall on deaf ears. 

But this is not Psalm 88. I do not end on the darkness as my only friend, although there have been days recently where that has felt like the ending all this will reach. I am lead to two places in God's word because two good friends have spoken them into my darkness. 

Firstly, this passage, speaking here with freshness into this despair:

Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinth 12:7-10)

I am weak, God knows. I am so weak I despair that I can do anything of worth. Satan torments me with his lies and defeats me, raising the hurricane in my emotions again and again. God knows why, I do not, that he allows this. But here is hope. Hope that in spite of all the times I come crashing down, in spite of having to start again and start again, that the Lord is more powerful. Paul knew that his weakness was there to keep him from pride, maybe mine is too, I have enough of that, but that I don't know. What I do know, is that what was true for Paul, must also be true for me. His grace is sufficient, and in my weakness his power is made perfect. My weakness may make it feel like I have nothing to offer, but God says, you don't know what you can't see. And what you can't see are the things I can make out of the broken, poor, short and curtailed efforts to serve me you are able to produce. You are weak. You are the weakest of all, but in your weakness my power will be seen all the more. In fact, your weakness is not a handicap in being useful in my kingdom, however you may feel. It is a strength. You believe you are insufficient, inadequate, too poor and mean a thing to have any contribution to make to my kingdom. Good, you are right, now serve me anyway with all the strength you have and watch me glorify myself by bestowing sufficiency by grace. 

The second passage that has brought comfort is Psalm 143.

Lord, hear my prayer,
    listen to my cry for mercy;
in your faithfulness and righteousness
    come to my relief.

Do not bring your servant into judgment,
    for no one living is righteous before you.

The enemy pursues me,
    he crushes me to the ground;
he makes me dwell in the darkness
    like those long dead.

So my spirit grows faint within me;
    my heart within me is dismayed.

I remember the days of long ago;
    I meditate on all your works
    and consider what your hands have done.

I spread out my hands to you;
    I thirst for you like a parched land.[a]

Answer me quickly, Lord;
    my spirit fails.
Do not hide your face from me
    or I will be like those who go down to the pit.

Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love,
    for I have put my trust in you.
Show me the way I should go,
    for to you I entrust my life.

Rescue me from my enemies, Lord,
    for I hide myself in you.
 Teach me to do your will,
    for you are my God;
may your good Spirit
    lead me on level ground.

 For your name’s sake, Lord, preserve my life;
    in your righteousness, bring me out of trouble.
 In your unfailing love, silence my enemies;
    destroy all my foes,
    for I am your servant.

The psalms are of course a treasury to the suffering, but often we don't know completely what to do with the cries of the Lord for vengeance against our enemies we find there. It feels indecent, inappropriate to appropriate these to the sin we personally face, to be inconsistent with mercy and forgiveness we are called to show to our enemies, and for me with the good intentions of many of the people who hurt us. Typically, therefore, I have tended to read these psalms exclusively through Messianic lenses. Jesus (and David as his prefiguring shadow) is God's king in God's world. His enemies who refuse his offer of salvation will justly face the wrath and vengeance of God for persecuting and oppressing his people, by which they are really by persecuting himself. In this interpretation we can call down God's wrath against the sin, evil and oppression of this world in general, but the hurt done to us peronally is excluded. As a result these passages have always felt a little remote to me, not particularly helpful in facing personal suffering. 

However a friend recently suggested an alternative way of reading these imprecatory psalms which have opened up a depth of richness to reading psalms like Psalm 143. That is in remembering that in living in this world as Christ's new creations, born again of the Spirit of truth, we have two identities. A new and perfect identity in the Spirit being created and an old and sinful identity in the flesh being put to death. Therefore the enemy against which we can call down God's wrath and might to defeat and destroy utterly is in fact within ourselves, the flesh that holds within it all of the curse of sin inherited in our human nature. 

Suddenly verses like "The enemy pursues me, he crushes me to the ground; he makes me dwell in the darkness  like those long dead", possess an immediacy and emotional resonance as prayers. This psalm has become a cry to the Lord for liberation from my own sinful nature and broken body which crushes and binds me as my enemy and makes me dwell in the darkness. I have a new, powerful vocabulary of prayer with which to share my despair at my own weakness and sin and my longing for God to make it right. 

I don't have any easy answers to the question of why. I don't have any easy answers to how change is going to happen, or how I am going to find the courage and strength to start again or what that will look like. But this I do know. I might feel like I have nothing to offer because once again everything in my life is broken and all the things I had begun are left unfinished, but God's grace is sufficient to make use of even the little I have to offer. I might feel like I am cast back to the beginning, that in truth I have really learned nothing because I was not able to enter into my identity in Christ to shelter from the storm that rages in my emotions. But God is working to defeat the brokenness and sin within me, that however many times it seems to triumph there is no winning for the enemies of God and nowhere to hide from him. He will pursue my sin, destroy it and silence it. I may weep with frustration at my seemingly unanswered prayers and the prayers of the many others praying the same thing, that I would find my identity secure in Christ, a shelter against the raging storm of emotion. But as a preternaturally wise young friend says, when I cry that God doesn't answer, "I guess that means we have to be patient then."