It’s the covert way that male depression hides that makes it scary. The blind spot that men can get taken out by. Men need ‘listening’ friends where they feel safe enough to tell their stories. It was like a fog was being lifted off around my brain. I was able […]
Life would never be the same again, but whose life is after struggling with an illness. Perhaps we have to redefine recovery and discover that there is no one ‘You-er than you’. Nathan had plans of becoming a doctor. But his parents separated when he was aged 15 and his world […]
‘Am I doing ok?’ was the question I was most frequently asked when I was a pastor/chaplain. ‘Is this Church safe?’ was another. Keeping pace were other limping souls … ‘Am I welcome here?’ ‘Does God really love me?’ ‘I can’t seem to get it right.’ ‘… keeps telling me […]
Do you think mental illness is God’s way of forcing us to slow down and change our behavior or is it the Devil messing with our minds? I recently received this question from one of the readers It’s an interesting question and one that I think has many questions under the question. […]
Just outside my window, I can see a beautiful yellow rose. It wasn’t there last week, well actually it was, but it was just tightly bound up under its green calyx. A lot can happen in a week, in a day, in a moment. I can see the beauty but to deeply […]
Around the hillside of the sheep farm where I was raised were grooves worn into the soil by hundreds of sheep following each other. It was the easiest route. I also have routes in my thinking patterns that have become ruts. Familiar paths that have been worn deep into my thinking. A thought gets […]
She walked into my office in a long, flowing skirt. She always had loved long, flowing skirts. But she blamed them and herself for both of her rapes. “Maybe if I hadn’t worn a skirt,” she thought. And she hated herself. The man read from his journal. Almost 20 pages […]
If you were to open my mother’s Bible, the first thing you would notice would be the handwritten verses and quotes that helped her mental health. Bible verses that can truly bring help. Dig a little further and you would come across underlined verses, cut out sections from the church […]
It was election day here in New Zealand last Saturday and as I stood in line to cast my vote I started a conversation with an elderly English gentleman. He had come to New Zealand in 1968 on a world trip. Running out of money, he decided to stay. ‘Well, why […]
When I was on a 6-hour road trip back to university I picked up a hitchhiker. It was cold and wintery as I turned a corner on the Desert road and I saw a young man with his thumb stuck out. Thin, short hair and poorly clothed for the winter, […]