10 Resolutions for Mental Health

REAL TALK in this article. Lol. Not the most sophisticated response to it, but expresses my sentiments at the moment. READ it! :)

From John Piper’s blog, Desiring God:

On October 22, 1976, Clyde Kilby, who is now with Christ in Heaven, gave an unforgettable lecture. I went to hear him that night because I loved him. He had been one of my professors in English Literature at Wheaton College. He opened my eyes to more of life than I knew could be seen. O, what eyes he had! He was like his hero, C. S. Lewis, in this regard. When he spoke of the tree he saw on the way to class this morning, you wondered why you had been so blind all your life. Since those days in classes with Clyde Kilby,Psalm 19:1 has been central to my life: “The sky is telling the glory of God.”

That night Dr. Kilby had a pastoral heart and a poet’s eye. He pled with us to stop seeking mental health in the mirror of self-analysis, but instead to drink in the remedies of God in nature. He was not naïve. He knew of sin. He knew of the necessity of redemption in Christ. But he would have said that Christ purchased new eyes for us as well as new hearts. His plea was that we stop being unamazed by the strange glory of ordinary things. He ended that lecture in 1976 with a list of resolutions. As a tribute to my teacher and a blessing to your soul, I offer them for your joy.

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

Read the rest of it here. :)

http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/10-resolutions-for-mental-healthv

Christ, the Filler, not the icing.

You have real problems. Life has been hard. You’re looking for answers. And people keep telling you the answer is Jesus Christ? Pfffffffft. 

The guy you see hanging on the Cross, on top of all those pretty churches? The man you hear about in Church every Easter Sunday?

Yes. That one. 

He came and fixed real problems.

The woman who had been married five times.

The DEAD.

The mentally ill.

The prostitute.

All healed. 

Jesus doesn’t want to be your ornament, he wants to show you the way. You just need to call out for Him, with all of your heart.

So if you think Jesus can’t work in your problems today, please take a minute to re-evaluate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPgyeKbdxPg

I see you sitting there.

You, sitting there. Wondering if there’s truly 100% joy out there. ‘There can’t be, right?’, you ask yourself. The cynics tell you this is all there is to life. ( What a lie.)

You’ve been pulled down over and over again.

You applied for that job. Didn’t get it.

 You got that dream job, but you’re still unhappy.

You have friends, but let’s be honest, you don’t even like them.

You get happiness from your music, but when the song’s over, it’s back to reality. 

There’s a void in your life you can’t explain. You just feel, empty.

No matter what you do, you just can’t shake it.

 It’s like no one understands.

You’re jumping off the walls of your mind.

“HOW DO I PULL MYSELF OUT OF THIS?’ you ask yourself. 

You may have heard this answer to this question, but I don’t know if you understand it well enough. 

The answer will and always be Jesus Christ. Before you write off this post as ‘one of those’, listen.

“but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:

He is that piece that you need in your life. When I tell people this, they laugh it off. But it amazes me how true this is, and how we just don’t get it.

“Is it really that simple?’ Yes.

‘How come more people don’t do this?’ Because people don’t want to step out of their lives and truly look for this 100% security, contentment and above ALL, love that they have a hunger for. 

When you get there,

when you reeeally want it,

just remember where you can find it. And give it a shot.

You won’t have anything to lose and ALL to gain. 

“And my God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus”

Please realize God when makes a promise to you. That, THAT is a promise. You can push on it. Pound on it. It will never be broken.

So what do you need?

Answers, chance at inner peace, sound mind, unconditional love, protection, security.

Start seeking.

http://peacewithgod.jesus.net/