40acts: Ready to ActSample

Act 22: Keep in Mind

Mental health has become a hot topic in recent years, and rightly so. It’s estimated that 16 million people in the UK suffer from a mental illness and that every week, 1 in 6 adults experiences anxiety or depression. That means that everywhere we go, we will meet people who are struggling privately with debilitating symptoms. Today is all about opening our eyes, ears and arms to those who need us.

On earth, Jesus experienced the full range of human experience and emotion. Hebrews lays this out in sometimes shocking terms: as we read the book, we come across a Jesus who grew, who was tempted in every way that we are, who can connect with and appreciate our weaknesses. Because of that, he is able to meet people who struggle with mental health issues and offer them something more profound than spiritual clichés. He can offer himself – there, empathising with them, the real Jesus. 

That’s why Hebrews can say that ‘we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathise with our weaknesses’ (4:15), and that’s why God is more than able to be ‘close to the broken-hearted, and sav[ing] those who are crushed in spirit’ (Psalm 34:18). When the Psalm says that God is close, it means more than just proximity and sympathy. There is no arm’s-length detachment here. He has a grasp and a lived experience of that exact pain.

Hebrews 4:15 makes something new available for us when we come to sit with people who seem beyond hope or help. When we stand at arm’s length from those with mental health struggles and offer surface sympathy, without honouring their vulnerability, we are actually stopping short of what Christ has made available to us. We get to share in his experience. We get to live from his life. As he is, so are we in the world. We bring who Jesus is and what he has to others, to those who are struggling. Our love becomes his encounter with them, at their point of need.