Bill e-mailed me this letter after listening to the podcast I did about Mental Health Disorders and Faith Communities.
Hello! I very much enjoyed your podcast about having a mental illness and how it is treated within the Christian
church. I have Bi-polar Affective Disorder also, and I have felt feelings and hurt just as you have in the church community as a whole. You are very articulate in the podcast in expressing those feelings of rejection and abandonment for what I think must be a lot of us who have mental illness but still are Christians.
The only thing that I have to add to your thoughts is that oftentimes God will bring one person even one special person into our lives that is a Christian who has gone through the same tragic and mystifying symptoms of a mental illness or who has had a family member with those symptoms that can give us hope and keep us afloat until the cycle of the illness moves forward finally to a better place. God did that for me.
The man’s name was Alex Sawyer and he had been suffering with depression for years. He saw my state of mental unbalance and instead of criticizing, he took me under his wing and got me to this poetry workshop every Tuesday night because he knew I enjoyed writing. Read the rest of this entry »
02-05-2008 |
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