bible and theology on Mental Illness

Gracious God, forgive us for when we fail to recognize the destructive power of mental illness. Every day we are surrounded by people with real emotional and mental difficulties that we ignore. We con...

Ann Voskamp, in her book The Broken Way, describes what it was like to have mental illness trivialized from the pulpit, as someone who identified with similar struggles: I was eighteen, with scars a...

Some years ago I received a letter from a young man I knew slightly. ‘I have just made a great discovery,’ he wrote. ‘Almighty God had two sons. Jesus Christ was the first; I am the second.’ I glanced...

As many theologians have helpfully described, there is a healthy place for doubting that is integral to faith. When approached thoughtfully and sincerely, these doubts can lead to a deepening understa...

Lord–Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Thank You that there’s no place we can hide from Your Spirit, no place we can flee from Your presence. We can’t go beyond the reach of Your love, nor out-distance the...

God of nations and Lord of all creation: You were there at the beginning of time and at our beginning, and You will be there at the ending and when we finally come home. There is no time You are not t...

Milton Rokeach wrote a book entitled The Three Christs of Ypsilanti….there were three patients in that hospital, each of whom thought he was Jesus Christ. One was too far gone in his psychotic isolati...

Lord–bless your people this day. God our Father—in Your love and compassion; Jesus, God the Son–with Your grace and truth; Spirit of God–in Your power and with Your love. Triune God, pour out Your bou...

God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—You are ever the same in Your grace and truth, Your power and love; Yet, You always challenge us to grow, change and become more like Jesus. We’re not yet what we w...

Our loving Father, You’ve loved us from everlasting to everlasting. While looking into the future we see only mist and shadows—you see it all with clarity and precision. That which we can only guess a...

Father–nothing escapes your notice, is beyond your care or too hard for you to take on, whether it concerns nations or individuals. You have a heart for all the world–not just our little piece of it. ...

The Lord calls us to examine the wounds of the Risen One and to see there the depth of his love for us. Let us therefore approach the throne of God in confidence as we pray for the people of God in Ch...

We thank You, God our Father, for Your grace, mercy and love, expressed today through Your Word and Sacrament; and we ask You to help us to pray and to know what to pray. You give us all good gifts: Y...

Loving God: Abba—our Father; Jesus—our Savior; Spirit—our Comforter. As Advent begins ... we take a deep breath, we grit our teeth and steel our nerves anticipating the fast pace of the next few week...

God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—our Loving Creator, Redeemer and Guide: We praise and thank You for being with us wherever we are on the journey of faith; whether we feel You or not—You are here wit...

A time will come when the whole world will go mad. And to anyone who is not mad they will say: 'You are mad, for you are not like us.

The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck spent many years of his practice as an agnostic. He, along with thousands upon thousands of his colleagues were taught that evil was a social construct, and therefore...

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

The Clinical psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi describes how our minds, without stimuli, tends to quickly turn towards negative thoughts, our dissatisfaction. Contrary to what we tend to assume, ...

I am mended by my sickness, enriched by my poverty and strengthened by my weakness…. What fools are we, then, to frown upon our afflictions! These, how crabbed soever, are our best friends. They are n...

Sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life instead of the...

When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.

We need to admit the mind into Christian fellowship again. We need the mind disciplined in Christ, enlightened by faith, passionate for God and his creation, to be let loose in the world.

The famous American psychotherapist M. Scott Peck was for many years an agnostic. He learned his psychiatry according to the standard model in which there was no such thing as evil. But at around the ...

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim su...

What many people call “psychological problems” are simple issues of idolatry. Perfectionism, workaholism, chronic indecisiveness, the need to control the lives of others—all of these stem from making ...

Silence. All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room.

Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.

No man is a devil in his own mind.

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy...