Video Transcript: What You Can Do

welcome to Mental Health Integration, week 12, part two. You've almost made it  through this entire class. One more after this. Well done today. I am really  excited to talk with you about the stories of what happens when this integration  happens. Well, we did a summary in the last section about what happens  throughout this course, and now we're going to talk about what happens when  people integrate their own lives. So let's go ahead and jump in. What I want to  hit on is things grow where they can. In the case of people, people grow as  much as they can in the space that they can. And if you create new ground for  them or new space for them to grow, sometimes they grow in new and profound  ways. So how do these people grow? I have three stories that I want to share  with you, and I am not giving you these people's names because, well, I'm  keeping them confidential. The first is a story of a man, and this man has three  kids. He's married. He's really, really bright, went to an Ivy League school, did all sorts of expeditions and things, and then settled down, had three kids, got  married, and then later in life, got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and when we  met, he was struggling in putting together this life with bipolar disorder. Wasn't  sure how this was going to work. He was trying to put together a support  system, and he just wasn't in good shape. And this man, he started looking and  trying to figure out how he could address his bipolar disorder, and had some  bigger, deeper questions. So we started meeting on a regular basis. He started  going through some overcoming groups and things like that, but really quickly,  what we found out was that he didn't know just some basic things about how to  take care of himself and what this process would look like and how to get better.  So we started there. We started with self care. We started with things like, can  you exercise and walk on a treadmill or do something like that? Can you take  care of yourself? And this is a really smart guy. He got that instantly, and then  his focus shifted. We started talking about psychiatrists and being faithful with  the process. So he decided just to commit to that. And then he started talking  about what it was to be a beloved Son of God, and he started talking about how  his identity was lost. He didn't know who he was anymore. He'd even gone  through a spiritual direction certification at a seminary, but he had no idea who  he was or where he was going anymore. He felt completely lost. He felt like his  relationships were broken and cracked. He felt like he couldn't be himself. He  felt like all of his capacity had been diminished. This should all sound familiar  from the last 11 weeks, right? Our capacity is shrinking, our relationships  breaking. This is the story, and so we committed to start walking through this  integration process. What we found out was really interesting. The more this  person dove into his identity, and the more he started working through what it  meant to be a child of God, the more he had to shed old identities, and as he  shed those, it brought new light onto his diagnosis, and he was able to look back at his past and say, Wow, in my undergrad, I did that at Ivy League school, but I  would do these marathons of work, and then I would just stop and not do 

anything. But those marathons were so productive that I would make so much  space afterwards that I could just kind of recover. And we got to see pretty  quickly that he was going through hypomania and plowing through an absolute  ton of work, and then hitting a depressive state and dropping all of this work,  and then going through another hypomania, getting all of this work done. And  then that would repeat, and it wasn't sustainable. As far as here's a deadline. I  need this by next Friday. It was sustainable, as in, here's this huge amount of  work. I will get it done when I can, and then some, and then I will need to make  up for it. So I'll still be much more productive than the average person, but it's  got to be on my timeline when I can actually be productive. We started looking at how he had believed in himself, but then that confidence had been shattered,  because all of a sudden he had been down for a long period of time, and he  hadn't had those hyperactive streaks. And because of that, his work was  suffering, because he wasn't doing great at work, and he was trying to figure  out, what am I going to do now? And so he was working on his meds, and he  was working on his self care, and he was working on his identity. After a little  while, he started realizing brand new that he was a beloved son. That's  something that he had known for years, but all of a sudden it started working its  way through the rest of his being. Satan began to penetrate, and he began to  get this idea of abiding and connecting with God, that God is or that Jesus is the vine. We're the branches, and our job is to stay connected to the vine. And he  started staying connected to the vine, and all of a sudden he started  experiencing this joy and this peace, and he was still trying to grow and still  trying to mend his relationships, but he was at peace. He wasn't tortured by  them. And he started changing the way he talked about things. We leave and  he'd say, Well, go drive fast, but don't be in a hurry. This idea that we slow down. And in that slow down, in that margin that we talked about, that's actually where  we find God's presence and believing in himself and restoring that Genesis 1-2  self, instead of that Genesis 3 self, he slowly began to mend the relationships  with his kids and mending his relationship with his wife, that was going to be a  long, long journey, because that had been fractured so bad under his under his  bipolar disorder. But I no longer, no matter how long it was going to take, he was at peace with the process, which I can't imagine, something better. The second  person I want to talk to you about had a completely different experience. She  went through one of the first groups that we did at a church, and she had the  experience of going through that group and being heard. She felt like, somebody gets me, somebody hears me. My church is amazing because they're finally  caring for me. And she had been an occupational therapist, and she said, You  know, I want this difference for other people. So she started asking questions  about this integration process. She started asking questions about, okay, how  do I can like, continue to integrate as a beloved daughter of God? How do I  continue to move into my identity? How do I continue to use all of these steps 

and and do something? What was interesting is she was also an occupational  therapist, and she had a history helping people. She knew how to create space,  she knew how to care for people, how to follow up, how to make sure people  were understood. So the leadership at her church reached out and said, Hey,  would you be interested in helping out with this. And she said, Yeah. And she  ended up with a co leader building a mental health ministry at their church that  changed the lives of just a few people to start and continued to grow and grow  and grow along the journey, she was inspired to meet her biological dad and to  start processing what it was to live without fear and to live in freedom and to live  connected to everything around her. And she started reaching out. She met her  biological dad, and it gave her this freedom as a beloved daughter, to be able to  just enter life in peace and enjoy she started getting even more confidence  through this process, because she was making change, and she was doing the  same abiding Journey, and this same value journey from Genesis 1-2, and she  was shedding this cloak of brokenness from Genesis 3. She's doing the same  things, but the difference was, she was in a church where they were grabbing  onto this idea of building this ministry with both hands, and they were just going  after it, and she wanted to be a part of it. So we talked, and we developed a long term support group model for her, and she implemented it and just ran with it.  She ended up developing basically the long term support model that My Quiet  cave was using, and we worked. And just like worked with her on that, and she  did it, she just built stuff because of her work and the work of a couple other  counselors. Actually, more than 200 people went through a mental health  ministry and were cared for over the course of the next couple years, just this  phenomenal group of people who experienced this incredible depth of growth  and healing because they joined this group with this woman who had had her  life changed because Jesus had grabbed a hold of her and said, No, you're not  bad because of your mental illness. You are understood, you are good, you are  valuable, you are worthy, and you can step into your power with that. And she  did, and because of that, hundreds of people experienced this huge life change.  The third person I want to tell you about had a very different experience. She  had a son, and the son had some mental health issues, and she had been  fighting tooth and nail to try and get him the help that he needed, and it was so  hard. She had looked at building support groups, and she had looked at finding  ways of getting support, and she just couldn't find the things that she was  looking for. Then finally, she just happens to remember that I had run into her at  a day at her high school when I had been presenting for an open day. Through  that process, she ended up getting some of the resources that she needed  through a group, and she felt like she was understood. She felt like she was  heard. She felt like she could make a difference. So she and I got together and  she said this, this has been so incredible, like I have a place now where I can  talk about what's going on with me and what's going on with my son, and I can 

talk about what's what happened with my parents, and I can talk about my  healing happening. And I continuing to grow and develop because of this, and I  need to find a place to share this. And she found two, as it was, the Christian  school that she was at said, Hey, we would like to run a group, and we're  actually going to make it open to make it open to the public, and then we're also  going to run a group for students, and we'll make that one open for all our  students. And she jumped in on both, and she started leading this group for  adults in the area, and it was full every time they ran it. There were people just  clamoring to hear what it was to be able to be heard and known and loved and  cared for, that they were valuable and good, that their story mattered, and that  God cared for them in the midst of this stuff and wanted them to be whole. And  then she started seeing the same thing in some of her students. At that point  that school came and said, Yeah, we want to run this as much as we can and  just keep running it, because there's a desperate need for it. Those are three  stories. And there's literally hundreds and hundreds of those stories that happen  over and over and over again of people when they experience this life change, it can't just stay inside. It has to go out. It has to grow and develop. And I think this is the story of the church, right? This change happens, and then it has to go out.  And our job as church leaders is to foster that space, to help that happen. Now.  It doesn't just happen with Individuals. Sometimes it also happens with  churches. That second story happened at a church in Aurora, Colorado, and this church had an incredible, incredible thing happened. The name of the church is  Colorado Community Church, and when I got contacted by Colorado  Community Church, it was because one of their pastors was leading a  disabilities ministry, and she had a daughter with Down syndrome, and she  started having people show up to this disabilities ministry who didn't have  disabilities like her daughter did. Instead, they had things like bipolar disorder,  depression, and they needed a space. She didn't have a space. So she talked to the rest of the leadership team, and they said, Well, do you think we should start something? And that's when we came in contact. And so we did our first class.  There our first group around mental health. This was when I was leading my  quiet cave. And so here's a mental health group in a church, and to the first  class, we had like 40 people show up, and classes are supposed to be capped  at 12. Luckily, a bunch of people decided the class wasn't for them right away,  so we shrank half that size, so we only had to do a double class instead of a  quadruple class. Anyway, we started the class and we had interest. We had a lot of interest. We started meeting with the leadership team, and they basically said, we're going to find a couple of volunteers. This is not something senior staff can  take on, but we're going to find a way to make this happen. This is a priority for  our church. So we started meeting with volunteers. We met an amazing  counselor named Michael. He helped out with it at the beginning. Then Heather  decided to jump in, then we had another counselor jump in, then we had another

group jump in. And what ended up happening is this church started one group  on mental health. And this is a large church, by the way, this is probably 1500 to  2000 people on a given Sunday. So this is a large congregation, but they started with one group, and then within a year, they had one group that was going every semester, plus they were starting a long term group. That long term group went  year round, and was a place where people could basically sit and grow, and  then we'd do these short groups that were basically like intensives. And they  started doing these intensives every semester, and then having this long group  go all year. Then My Quiet cave launched a sister organization working with  veterans called advancing warriors that's still running, and Dr Ellie Stevens is  running that, and all of a sudden they're getting trained in order to run groups for veterans, since there's a military base fairly close to there. And then we worked  with another group, and we built a curriculum for moms. And all of a sudden,  that's happening there. And then we built another curriculum for teens. All of a  sudden, that's happening there. All of a sudden, Colorado Community Church  was running three, four groups for mental health every year, plus this long term  group and their church was starting to reach out to the surrounding area and  reach people from other churches in the surrounding area who were also  looking to experience this integration. And all of a sudden, that mental health  group was serving hundreds of people every single year, and it still is. It just  keeps going. And at this point they've said, this is one of the key points of the  ministry of this church. We serve people who don't get served by it, and this is,  this is one of the key groups, and that is as an inner city church doing hard work  that said mental health is part of this work, and it's just beautiful. The other story  I want to share is another church that started with a group and I met with their  pastor after they had run a few of these different groups, and he said, I don't  know what's going on in this group. It seems to be really cool, but the more I get  into it, the more I just want all of our young adults and all of our like. The 20s  and 30s to go through one of your groups, because people come out and they're doing better, and they have better relationships, and they're healthier, and it's  like they're them. And when I told you that this could change the DNA of your  church, that's exactly what I mean. When people get changed from the inside  and they experience who they are as whole human beings, they invite that  authenticity from others by sharing it themselves. They give others the gift of  going second, and once they experience that, that's what they want, we can't  taste what it is to be in the garden and not want to be there. So finally, what  happens in the kingdom? First of all, I want to take you off of the hook. You are  not responsible for pushing the kingdom forward and making it all happen.  Kingdom work is not work that you do for Jesus. It is work you do with Jesus. It  is work that you are a branch. He is a vine. He produces fruit through you. You  do not have to do this work on your own. That said, when you experience  healing, it just changes who you are. You become as Isaiah 61 says, The oak of 

righteousness. You end up giving people the healing that they just desperately  need, because it's the healing that you've encountered. Your wounds shine like  dark. Shine like dark stars. Your wounds are where the light shines through, and it's where Jesus is found with people. They experience your life, and they want  that life. The Kingdom is not this grand thing where we talked about, how can we reach a million people in the next month? The kingdom is it's smaller and  steadier in a lot of ways, and it's smaller and steadier in some ways, because  our wounds are what make people see us. Our community is what people make. Makes us see us. They will know we are Christians by our love, and in that  grace and authenticity that's created when we can be fully ourselves and where  we don't have to live with under expectations, then our love can pour forth, and  they will know our that we are Christians by our love. Thank you so much. In the  next section, we're going to talk a little bit little bit about covid, and I just want to  say thanks again for joining me over this journey.