Extending a Hand that Feels Like the hand of god

​A growing number of headlines connect our mental health crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic.

On one hand, those headlines encourage me. There are finally conversations about the importance of mental health. On the other hand, it demonstrates how blind we've been to a crisis that was a crisis long before Covid-19 became one.

For decades, hundreds of thousands of young people and middle aged people and our elderly friends and neighbors have been waking up each and every day with a sense of impending dread and hopelessness and fear they have no idea how to escape.

The fact that many Americans are waking up now experiencing some of this for the first time doesn't mean 50,000 people didn't take their lives by suicide last year because they'd been feeling those things for a long time.

It doesn't mean 70,000 people didn't overdose on drugs last year - many of them trying to bury their feelings of hurt and depression and hopelessness.

Long before Covid-19 got here, more middle school and high school students than ever have been saying they seriously considered suicide last year. Here in Virginia, on a recent recent youth survey, 20% of our students said they seriously considered ending their lives last year.

I'm simply saying that just because many Americans are waking up imagining how much easier life would be if they weren't in this struggle for the first time in their lives doesn't mean a whole lot of Americans haven't been waking up with that feeling for a very long time.

I think we're discovering there's a difference between feeling down and a little nervous about life than being downright depressed and anxious. For many years, that is what has killed the mentally ill, this notion that 'well I've felt down before and I found a way to get out of bed so why can't you?'

This notion has robbed people of the help and resources people get without any question when they wake up complaining of a sore throat or a swollen ankle.

People are discovering depression and anxiety aren't as simple as a bad mood or a bad day. It's like swallowing a 150 pound weight. They read a "you can do it" meme on Facebook and feel like, okay - I can do it. I can climb from this bed. And they try.

But then the weight.

I think that weight sometimes becomes 300 pounds if you're a Christian. We've painted this picture that as Christians we're immune to swallowing weights. We have God on our side. If Jesus can rise from the dead surely we can rise from the bed.

Well Christians, have you ever read Psalms? How many weights did David swallow? How many days did THAT guy struggle to get out of bed, crying out to God, I just can't do this God.

Being a Christian doesn't mean we are immune to the pain and suffering of anxiety and depression, it just means we always have someone who gets it when a lot of the world around us doesn't.

That is always the starting point to getting rid of that weight. Knowing someone knows you are carrying it. Knowing that because they do know it, they are going to give you a hand. They are going to tell you "I know you can do it," but not without giving you a hand or a hug or a phone number or a crane if that's what you need to help you get up and find the help that will help.

Bob Goff says "anxiety doesn't leave a ransom note when it steals our lives." He's right, it doesn't. It doesn't send us some demands we have to meet before it sets us free. But just because it doesn't send one doesn't mean we don't know what that note would say.

It would say you need a friend. You need a friend to know you're not in a bad mood or just having a bad day. You need a friend who knows you feel trapped and buried. You need a friend who goes beyond "cheer up" and says let me pick you up.

As Christians, we know God is always handing us his hand. It's just often harder to see it when that hand doesn't look like someone's hand who completely gets our struggle.

This Covid 19 virus may have been novel. But the mental health crisis we're connecting to it, it is not novel. My hope is, though, that by calling this mental health crisis a new crisis, by sounding new alarms, we'll discover for the first time just how much some of our friends have been suffering.

And we'll extend a hand. A hand that just maybe they'll come to recognize as the hand of God.