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.