Some people will not understand what the love of Christ compels you to do; do it anyway.

Some view mental illness as a purely spiritual issue and deny the need for medication or other forms of treatment. Others view it as an illness with no spiritual aspect. I believe it's a combination of both.

My times of silence before God are very important to me now. I put everything else down, every word away, and I am with the Lord. When I'm quiet, life falls into perspective for me. I have a very active mind and I'm a worrier, but in those moments when I choose to put that away, I rest beside the Shepherd in still places. Why don't you give yourself a gift today? Turn off the television or the car stereo, put down the newspaper or the business plan, and in the quietness, rest for a while beside the Shepherd of your soul.

Lord God, I long to hear Your voice but not just secondhand through teachers, as wonderful and godly as they can be. I long to hear Your voice firsthand.

But the witness of the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is that God's most difficult promise has been kept.

I got pregnant and turned 40 at the same time.

When I was hospitalized in 1992 with severe clinical depression I thought I was the only one. I didn't know of one other Christian struggling with any form of mental illness. What I didn't know then was that there are thousands and thousands of men and women who love God yet are struggling alone, in silence, full of shame. This has to end. It's time to shine the brightest light into the darkest corners of the church