What if...

Before all this world madness began, I was having lunch with a group of my closest friends and we were talking about God, evangelism, the Church and how sometimes we, as the Body of Christ, are failing to show God's love and mercy to those who are suffering, specially inside the Church and how so many people are leaving or even committing suicide for our inability to have compassion.

This conversation has stuck with me ever since, making me wonder the reason why: why we as the Church are not being efficiently enough in the love of Christ to reach those who are suffering and in need, specially in the area of mental health? Why is the Church not ready to handle mental health? And I want to highlight that I am not saying we are not doing it, I am just saying we are not being efficiently enough and in some areas we are not ready. And through this months, in which I have had more time to think, study and pray about the subject, thanks to the endless quarantine and lockdown, I have come to the following conclusions.

First, we don't have enough knowledge about mental health. A lot of the premises that we have come from intuition and from what we assume it is, but not really from knowledge. We must begin by understanding that psychology as a science is very young, since it has been understood as such since the end of the 19th century, while medicine as a science date back to prehistory.

Taking the above into account , it can be concluded that the knowledge each one has, its depth and the advances or the study of each one is very different, with which it can be said that psychology is in a childhood stage compare to medicine. Still, great strides have been made when it comes to mental health, but there is still a long way to go.

With the above clear, it is very important to understand that when it comes to mental health illness, such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc., the battle is fought in the mind, and yes all life battles are fought there, but what I mean to say is that the battle is the mind against the mind; it's like an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks it's own antibodies, so are mental illness, your mind is attacking that part of you which is fighting the battle. And it's for that reason that when it comes to mental illness we need much more help from the people around us, than maybe in other battles we can be facing.

And in order to help those who are going thought this battles, it's of utmost importance to understand and know what they are facing. That said, the first thing we should have clear is that depression and anxiety (and all other mental illness, but we will focus in the first two) ARE NOT a simple worry, sadness or anguish. They are extreme, excessive, uncontrollable and intense emotions, produced by imbalances in the level of serotonin and other neurotransmitters in the brain. For this reason, they should not be treated as if they were something simple or temporary, but on the contrary, they should begin to be seen as what they really are, a mental illness, which affects people the same way or even more than cancer, AIDS, or an autoimmune disease. We must to stop thinking that is lack of fixing our eyes on Jesus, or not praying enough, or not having enough faith.

In my personal experience, the moments when my anxiety has been at its most critical points is when I have had my eyes fixed on Jesus the most, it's when I have been closest to Him, because I know that without him I could not move forward. So we need to remove that paradigm that is preventing us from being able to affectively help those who are suffering from these diseases, both outside and inside the Church.

All my life I have loved movies, not only for the entertainment but because in all films there is always something that leaves a teaching. In the 2011 movie <<Footloose>> (the remake), there is a scene in which the pastor arrives at the church and finds his daughter with his wife and the daughter has her face all bruised because someones hit her; after a discussion about it the daughter says the following to her dad:

"Isn't this my church? Isn't it? Isn't here where we are supposed to talk about our problems?I've been so lost, I've been losing my mind, and you don't even see it, you don't even care"

And that is my question, are we caring for those who are suffering? Those who are losing their mind? Do we really care? Or we simply say that because it is the Christian thing to say. We need to remember what James 2:17 says, that faith without works is dead, that is, our words without actions to support them are worthless.

Second, we are more concerned with our "position" within the church than being light and showing God's love to those who are going through difficult times in their mental health. We are more concerned with showing how holy we are, how much Bible we know and how many likes our posts about Jesus have, than with getting our hands and feet dirty to go and help those who maybe, in our perception, are not as holy or at the same level as we are. We are so busy wanting to be "christian celebrities" and using our social media to achieve it, that we are forgetting what James 1:26-27 says:

"26 If someone believes they have a relationship with God but fails to guard his words then his heart is drifting away and his religion is shallow and empty. 27 True spirituality[b] that is pure in the eyes of our Father God is to make a difference in the lives of the orphans,[c] and widows in their troubles, and to refuse to be corrupted by the world’s values.." (TPT)

In other words, it doesn't matter how much we pretend, doesn't matter how much we say or post, what matters is what we really live from what we are talking and what we do for those who are having troubles in their lives, in this case, those people who are struggling with their mental health. It's time to start talking less and doing more, putting our hand to the plow which means getting off the pedestal on which we have ofter put ourselves and getting dirty helping to clean the "impurities" of those who need it.

This, the lack of knowledge and the self-centeredness, doesn't allow us to have mercy and compassion for those who are suffering, since we are so focused in ourselves that we can't see others. We don't give the Holy Spirit the space to show us the pain of others, because the only thing we pray for is ourselves, we have a selfish faith.

We have to understand that mental illnesses are silence illnesses and therefore is not that easy to recognize or talk about them. In the last season of <<13 reasons why>>, in the funeral of one of the characters, the minister says: "Too little caring, too much hate and anger, hurt. There are a number of silence diseases, a number of ills that thrive when we are silent about them, because we let our fears, our shame, our twisted moral code to keep us in silence as death stalks more children. I say enough, enough shifting blame, enough pointing fingers, enough confusing those who report the damage with those who cause it."

And so it is, it's time to begin to educate ourselves and talk about it, it's time to face it obviously with faith, but also knowledge, because even the Bible says in Hosea 4:6 that God's people perish for lack of knowledge; and I personally am not willing to give the devil one more inch in the lives of the people around me.

So, what if we start to educate ourselves about mental illness? What if we study the Bible enough to know with certainty, and not by intuition, what the Bible says about this subject? What if we stopped fearing the unknown and learn to address it? What if we stop believing that because we are Christians it is wrong to ask for professional help? What if we stop believing that having a mental health problem means not having faith or being estranged from God? What if we stop assuming and start asking?

I believe that if we start doing all this things, more battles would be won, more people would be restore and ready to fulfill God's purpose for their lives, more people would be won for the Kingdom of Heaven, but must importantly, we would take aways the devil's field, since in my personal opinion, we are already so good and have so much faith and knowledge regarding how to win the battle in physical illnesses, that now, his main target is mental illnesses and to this days it has been very successful in his purpose of stealing, killing and destroying in that area, not only those outside the church, but also whose within it.

So I invite you to stop wondering what if, and start change it into realities, to begin to really live to love like Jesus loves, although on many occasions that will mean making ourselves uncomfortable and go out of our comfort zone.