124. How is it with your soul?

Matthew 11:28: "Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

    If I ask you today, "How is it with your soul?", I'd like you to think of the inside you – your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, everything that goes on inside you. Are you all dressed up on the outside and ready to face the day, but on the inside there is a dark cloud overshadowing you that no one knows about?
    I saw a Facebook meme the other day that said: "I don't know why people are complaining about wearing masks to church because of COVID-19, because they have been wearing masks for years."
    This made me realise that we go through life, inwardly feeling a dark cloud, with our thoughts, feelings and emotions, our hopes and dreams and aspirations shattered. We are not feeling good on the inside, but yet we are dressed up on the outside, putting on a mask, pretending to go through life as if everything is okay, as if everything is hunky-dory. But inside we are not okay.
    This meme is so true because many of us pretend that we are fine when we are not. The greatest lie ever told is: "I am well, thank you. I am fine."

    Another question that needs to be asked, is: "Do you have someone to speak to if you are not fine on the inside?"
• Who do you speak to when you are not fine on the inside? Where do you go to with this darkness, with this cloud that you are experiencing on the inside? Maybe this dark cloud you are experiencing is because of difficulties in your relationships, or stress at work? Maybe you had a health scare, or perhaps you are struggling with financial burdens that are piling up? Perhaps you have fears about the future or regarding academic challenges or your physical well-being?
• When you go through things like, relationship stress, work stress, health scares, financial burdens, fears about the future and academic challenges, who do you speak to?
• When people have outside burdens, when their physical bodies are not doing well, they go to a doctor. But when we are facing trials and tribulations, when we are not feeling so well inwardly, where do we go to?
• The truth is that many do not have anyone to go to. They do not have a confidant or somebody they feel safe in speaking to about the inward struggles and trials and tribulations, and then all these difficulties pile up and often lead to various mental illnesses.
• The silence that we experience about what is going on inwardly, is because of the stigma that we are facing. The stigma in not being able to deal with our everyday life, the "stuff" that we go through, makes us carry it alone inwardly – and this becomes a tremendous inward burden.
• Sometimes this pressure becomes unbearable, perhaps even to the point that we might find ourselves booked into a psychiatric clinic or hospital. And then we feel very alone and isolated and maybe even weak and judged and guilty, asking ourselves: "How did I end up in a psychiatric hospital? A hospital for the crazy, for the mad, for those who are loony?"
• This is part of the problem – the way that some people speak about the psychiatric hospitals and the stigma that surrounds mental health. It is not a loony bin. It is not a crazy house or a madhouse. It is a mental hospital. A hospital for those who are struggling with mental illness. It is a hospital for those who are struggling with the inward burdens of life as opposed to those who are struggling with the outward burdens of life.
• When people do end up in psychiatric hospitals, or go for mental health help, whether they see a psychologist or psychiatrist, many do not tell anybody that they are seeing a mental health practitioner or that they are in a mental health hospital because they do not want others to know that they've been diagnosed with a mental illness.
• And they end up suffering alone.

    I want to encourage you today not to suffer alone. Don't continue wearing the mask of silent suffering. You already have enough that you are struggling with. Don't add to this amount of battles the pressure of suffering alone.

    Mental health problems, especially in African countries, have been tremendously stigmatised. Because these problems are misunderstood people hide them. A survey was done in Africa asking for the various reasons why people think someone can be diagnosed with mental illness. In other words, what causes mental illness?
• The number one reason ranked on the questionnaire was that people struggle with mental illness due to drug abuse. We know that this is not always true. It could be one of the reasons, but many people who struggle with mental illness have never touched drugs.
• The second highest one was that mental illness is due to God's punishment on people's lives. A kind of Divine wrath, if you may.
• The third reason that they noted for mental illness was that the person is demon possessed or because of witchcraft.

    These three reasons are very often found to be lower on the rankings of why people struggle with mental illness. As a matter of fact, sometimes none of these reasons are the reason why people struggle with mental illness. But we are so uninformed. Society is so uninformed. We have these false beliefs surrounding mental illness. We believe it is due to drug abuse or God's punishment, in other words, a person has sinned or has done something wrong. Or a person has been possessed by demons, or has been dabbling in witchcraft, that is why they've gone off their mind and lost their rocker.
    Because of these false beliefs, people sit with the stigma and they suffer in silence. They do not speak out when they are struggling. They do not go to a mental health practitioner to help them. They do not book themselves into a psychiatric hospital. As a matter of fact, they don't even go for a mental health check-up.
    Truth is that very few of the things that have been sited are actually the real cause of mental disease. Very few people sited the real causes, or understand the real causes of mental illness. Mental illness is caused by genetics, by an underlying illness, by troubles in socio-economic status, or when a person is struggling with overcoming the death of a loved one, unemployment or social conflict. All of these contribute to hormonal changes within the brain that can, if they pile up, eventually lead to various types of mental illnesses.
    Why are these things piling up? Because we do not feel safe speaking about them. Because we wear a mask. Because we keep the pressures inside.
    We all have various struggles which are real struggles. These struggles should not be looked down upon. They should be helped with by the people around us, by God, and by ourselves. Unfortunately we wear this mask and we always say: "I am fine. I am okay. I am dealing with it." But we don't deal with it. If we were to deal with it inwardly in our own kind of way and manner, then we would be fine. But for most people, when they say that they are dealing with it, they are not really dealing with it. They are simply bearing it. They simply bottle up all of the struggles they are going through until eventually, one day, the bottle is full. The brain has taken so many hits that it cannot handle them anymore. And that is when a person cracks. That is when a person lands up in hospital. Eventually they have no other choice but to go to a mental health practitioner and they land up in the psychiatric hospital.
    What actually should happen when these little things start creeping up is that we should start addressing them immediately. But, because of the various beliefs of the society we live in, people unfortunately do not seek help until it is almost too late. We believe that people have mental illnesses because of weakness or drug addiction or because they are cursed or because they are being punished for sin. Therefore, many with mental illnesses end up suffering alone. And you might be one of them.
    As a result of the stigma and the false beliefs surrounding mental illness, many people end up feeling very guilty. They are fearful. They feel anger. They feel isolated. They feel judged. And because of this, they feel less inclined to share the troubles they are going through. They feel less inclined to seek out the help of support groups to help them to deal with the inward struggles of life.
    Because of this lack of support and understanding, and because of the guilt and the shame surrounding mental illness, it sometimes even leads to personal denial. What do I mean? Sometimes, because of the outward stigma, we refuse to admit that we are struggling with mental illness. We refuse to admit our diagnosis. We refuse to go for a mental health check-up. We feel that something is wrong inside, but we've never been for a check-up. We've never been to see someone. (We don't even go for a physical check-up.) Perhaps the pressure of our inward life has become so much that we actually do have a clinical mental illness.
    The stigma is really uncalled for. Our physical bodies become weaker and more prone to illness and disease as we get older. That is why the doctors, our work and everybody else tell us that we should go for regular physical check-ups. Many people do schedule check-ups every year as they get older. Or if they are a little bit younger, every three years, or every seven years, depending on how old they are. But some others do not want to admit or they are in denial that their brains also become weaker and more prone to illness and disease as they get older, just like the other organs of the body. Just like we go for a physical check-up for our physical health, it is important that we go for a mental check-up for our mental health.
    We should speak to someone, not just when we are old or when we are already in a mess. We should talk to someone even when we are young or when we start feeling the pressures of life amounting, to ask, "What are the things that are causing the pressure?" Sometimes we do not even know what it is that could have been contributing to our mental illness. Or that could be leading towards mental illness because not all of us have been clinically diagnosed with mental illness, and not all of us have had so many hits on the brain that we do have a mental illness. But many of us are in danger of getting to that place because we do not go for those regular check-ups. We do not get rid of those little things which build up and build up and build up. 
    Prevention is so much better than cure. Do not wait until you are exhausted. Do not wait until you are so overburden that you cannot cope anymore. If you start feeling that the pressures of life inwardly are getting too much, seek out help.
    So, my question to you today is: "How is it with your soul? What does your inside look like?" If you were to look into the soul mirror of your life, what would you see on the inside? Would you see peace, passion, excitement for life, and love? Would you see all the beautiful hopes and dreams, and contentment in your life? Or would you be seeing fear and pain and guilt and sorrow, perhaps experiencing a dark cloud and rain on the inward as opposed to sunshine and joy? What are you looking at? What do you see in your soul mirror today?
    Let's be honest about it. If you look into your inner well-being, if you look at your brain's health and well-being, the well-being of little Bob, your brain, today, what would Bob look like? Is Bob perhaps broken? Is Bob perhaps malnourished, toxified, dirty, tired and in desperate need of love and attention? Perhaps Bob is broken because he has been overfed with the fat in the junk of this world, the toxic joys and pleasures of this world? Perhaps Bob looks a bit greasy and out of breath and in need of a break of all the false pleasures you have been feeding him? Maybe Bob is in need of a purer, more balanced experience of life?
    Or, if you are looking inward, do you have a strong, well-nourished and healthy and balanced and rested and refreshed Bob, a soul experience that is a good one?
    When we look at our brains it is difficult for many of us to admit that they look neglected, almost like a homeless child. Or perhaps not so neglected, but spoiled like an overweight, unhealthy child. And both of these are unhealthy. The poor homeless little Bob who is malnourished is not healthy. And the spoiled overweight Bob who has been fed the pleasures of this world is also not healthy.
    Just like some people in this world tend to ignore the street children, the homeless children, or the health of the spoiled rich kid, we tend to neglect our little Bob's as well. We tend to rather just turn the eye. We look elsewhere. We are in denial. We do not want to admit that our little children, our brains whom we should have taken care of, haven't been taken care of. We do not want to admit that we've neglected them either through malnourishment or through abuse. This hurts. It hurts to admit that our little Bobs, our little children, our minds, are not okay and that they are not going to be okay.
    To simply ignore our brains or to look the other way, hoping that somehow our brains are going to find their own health, is not going to work. Our brains are like little children who cannot take care of themselves. We have to take care of them. We have to feed them and nourish them. We have to take care of our Bobs. Sometimes Bob is in ill-health because we didn't know that we had a little child whom we needed to take care of. We thought that Bob could take care of himself. We thought that our brains will take care of themselves, but our brains are organs in our bodies which we have to take care of. We need to nourish them and make sure that the right things are going in and the wrong things are kept out.
    Because of this hurt we sometimes look away and we don't do the things we need to do in order to help Bob. So, how can we help Bob? There are four steps we can take:
1. The first step is to look into our soul mirrors today to see whether Bob is okay. If Bob is not okay, we need to admit it to ourselves, to say: "Bob is not okay."
2. Secondly we need to sit down and analyse why Bob is not okay. Is Bob not okay because he has been neglected? Maybe he did not get all the things he needed in order to be good? Or maybe he has been spoiled with the pleasures of this world to the point that he is now nauseated and fat and unhealthy because of all of the things we have given him? We sort of overfed him.
3. Next is to be kind to ourselves. We will probably feel guilty when we realise that Bob is looking like a child who has either been underfed or overfed with the things of this world. We need to be kind to ourselves because most of us haven't realised that we had this little child to take care of, or that we need to treat our brains like a small child. Maybe we've accidentally neglected him or spoiled him or ignored him. We need to be kind to ourselves, telling ourselves: "I am giving myself a break from the past because I didn't know that I had this little kid I had to raise and take care of, and to keep certain things away from him and feed him other things. But now I know Bob is not okay."
4. When we said: "Bob is not okay", the next step is to go and seek help. Like we would seek out the help of a medical doctor when we have physical ailments, we need to seek out the help of a mental health professional when we have mental ailments. We are not medical doctors and we do not necessarily know how to treat all the illnesses of our physical bodies. In the same way we are not mental health doctors and we do not always know how to treat all the illnesses of our mental bodies.
  There are various ways that we can go about this. We can go and read up about mental illnesses. We can listen to some talks on mental illness. We can go and see a mental health professional, get a life coach to help us with the mental illness or do some self-study. But whatever it takes, we need to educate ourselves regarding how to take care of our mental health – how to put those things which are good for our mental health in, as opposed to be taking out the things which are not good for our mental health.

    It is never too late to start taking care of Bob. God created our bodies and our minds in such a beautiful way that, despite the neglect, despite the abuse, or whatever it is that has caused us to come to this place where we either already have mental health issues or are in danger of getting them. It is never too late because God created our bodies to heal themselves when we do what is right for that process of healing. When we put those things in place which are supposed to be there for our physical as well as our mental health, our bodies and our minds start to heal. This is a blessing from God. I believe that when we do what God expects us to do, He will bless us with added healing and strength to continue on our path of healing inwardly as well as outwardly.
    If your soul, your inward person, your little Bob is tired or dirty or hungry, maybe thirsty or toxic or diseased or feeling out of breath, hurt, worn out and feeling ready to collapse, my recommendation is to take some time to bandage Bob's wounds and to address the pains and hurts of the past in the presence of God and also in the presence of others.
    How can Bob's wounds be bandaged? James 5:16 says: "Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may find healing." You should stop living behind those masks of pretending that everything is okay, pretending before God and before others within your faith community that you are fine. Speak to people whom you trust. Say to them: "I am struggling." I don't want to say that you must confess your sins, but speak to people because it brings healing (James 5:16). The way that you bandage up the wounds is to admit that they are there and to start speaking about them and to start addressing them in a proactive manner.
   If you are feeling hungry inside, feed your soul. Feed your little Bob mentally with the Word of God. Also feed your Bob physically with good food and with good exercise and rest. John 6:35 says: "Jesus said unto them, 'I am the bread of life; whoever comes to Me shall never hunger, and whoever believes in Me will never thirst.'" If your Bob is hungry, feed him with the Word of God. Feed him with those things that will give him strength and what else he needs to continue on this journey, this road of life.
    If your Bob has been toxified, detox him. Detox your soul. Fast from the man-made, worldly pleasures and learn to nourish your soul with the love and the pleasures of God. Colossians 3:2 says: "Set your minds on the things that are above, not on the things that are on earth." Detox your soul from the things of this earth and fill it with the things of God.
    Perhaps Bob is the dirty little child who needs to be washed. I believe the way that you will be cleansed on the inside is through true repentance and through experiencing the forgiveness where you forgive yourself for not knowing how to take care of your Bob. You need to forgive yourself and to let go of that guilt. 1 John 1:9 says: "If we confess our sins ..." (now remember sins are not always purposeful sins. Sometimes the sins are sins of ignorance where we did not know what we were doing). If we confess our sins and we say to the Lord, 'Lord help us' the Bible says: "... He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." I believe this cleansing is not just a cleansing of our conscience and our guilt, but it is a physical cleansing where God helps to remove the dirt and the consequences and the diseases from our lives which we sometimes have innocently gotten ourselves into.
    If your Bob is out of breath, if he needs the breath of life again, give it to him. Prayer is that breath of life he needs. Breathe deeply. Pray more. Take time to put breath into Bob through prayer. 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says that we should pray without ceasing, every day. Where ever you go, have God on your mind. Speak to Him. Talk to Him about your ills, about that dark cloud you feel on the inside, so that Bob can be well again.
    Bob also needs rest, so learn to rest Bob. The Bible recommends that we rest not just from our physical work, but from our emotional trials and tribulations as well. Exodus 34:21 says: "Six days you shall labour, but on the seventh day you shall rest." This is important.
    So, take time to bandage up Bob's wounds. Take time to feed Bob. Take time to detox Bob, to wash him clean from the dirt he has experienced. When Bob is out of breath, take time to pray. And take time to give Bob the rest he needs.
    Slowly but surely, as we implement these things, Bob will heal. Bob will become less tired and dirty and hungry and thirsty. Bob will become more satisfied and happy and wholesome and start experiencing the true pleasures God has to offer him.
    We need to stop stigmatising mental health. We need to stop putting on that mask and stop refusing to talk about that which is troubling us. If we do not learn to do this, we are further traumatising those who are already afflicted, and we push them into a place of silent suffering.
    We need to realise that a person's brain is after all only an organ. Just like the heart, the liver and the lungs over time become weak and become susceptible to environmental damages and illnesses and diseases, so too can our brains become susceptible to environmental damages, diseases and illnesses over time.
    We need to feed our Bobs, grow our Bobs, nourish our Bobs and take care of them just as much as we would do with our physical health.
    God's message to us today is found in Matthew 11: 28. If our Bobs have been neglected, if our souls are weary, if we've looked into the mirror of life and said, "I am tired and worn out", this is God's message for us: "Are you tired? Worn out? Burnt out on religion? Come to Me. Get away with Me and I will recover your life. I will show you how to take a real rest. Walk with Me and work with Me – watch and learn how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with Me and you will learn to live freely and lightly" (The Message).
    May this be our experience in life going forward.