In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month this May 2025, I was asked to speak at church on the topic of emotional and mental well-being. Following is a copy of that sermon. I’m humbled by all the requests for copies and moved that it landed with so many people. I guess it’s because the message was simple: Every bit of our individual humanity is sacred and we will always need each other to thrive as humans.

“You know Kim, there’s no hate like Christian love,” said a recent client of mine who identifies as queer, as he plopped himself down in one of my office chairs. Being dehumanized by misguided “Christian” politicians and their cult-like followers waving American flags, spewing hate and lies, at minimum, gets tiring. This isn’t what Jesus recommended. I’d suggest staying away from their bible studies because I’m pretty sure it isn’t the bible they’re studying. And in the meantime, let me know when you come across scripture where Jesus said, “Dehumanize and cause harm to others.” I won’t hold my breath waiting for your reply.

So, in defense of all the Jesus followers who imperfectly do their best to live what Jesus proclaimed as his most important message – Love God and love others as you want to be loved – I see you. For all the folks hurt by those who’ve corrupted Jesus’s message to justify their intolerance and hate – I see you and the world is a better place because you are here.

And in defense of Jesus – I see and feel you in the kindness and compassion of others. I witness your majesty in our spectacular natural world every day. I feel you move through me. I see you in all the folks united in difference and in service to each other doing the best they can to promote social justice – Jesus style. And thanks too, Jesus, for modeling how to ‘human’ well to teach us how to create an earth as it is in heaven.

I hope you enjoy the sermon.

When Pastor Bill asked me to speak today to honor Mental Health Awareness month, my first response was Ehhhhhh. I pray that God’s will be done in my life a lot, but sometimes, when uncomfortable comes knocking, I’m like…yeah, God…I’ve kinda changed my mind on “Thy will be done thing when it comes to me right now.” And then I take a breath and remember. I remember that when I do hard things - either by choice or not- I’m typically led to a new place, a new opportunity, a type of healing, a learning or another beginning when I let God work through me. What I know for sure, is that when we do His will or even when we don’t, we’re always tucked safely in the palm of his hand because God doesn’t want us to ever do anything alone.

Pretty much every day in my current line of work as a therapist, and as a former high school teacher and school counselor, I’ve reminded children, teens, adults, families, couples and my own children and grandchildren time and time again that they can do hard and that hard is a part of this life. On the daily, I remind folks that to get to a better place, doing hard or uncomfortable is a big part of how you get there armed with the support of others and holding on to just a dot of hope. A seed of faith.

So, before I said “yes” to standing before you today, God kinda nudged me along in ways that speak to me. “So Kim…In so many words, you yap all day long about trusting the power of the Light within and the importance of hard work and clinging tightly to hope when things get hard or uncomfortable. For the last 30 years in classrooms, libraries, offices, bathrooms, police cars, homes, shelters, courtrooms, workplaces, hospitals, and on the floor and sidewalks, you’ve been pretty good about allowing me to work through you by coaxing you to step out of your comfort zone and meet my children where they are, even when it’s gotten really messy. So Kim, why are we stopping now? How messy and uncomfortable can preaching a sermon on minding our mental and emotional states get? So Kim…you might want to think about practicing what you preach on the daily which in this case is to put in some hard work by writing a sermon and do a little uncomfortable.” No biggie - right? 

And because God has a great sense of humor, here I am preaching what I’ve encouraged people to practice - like for my whole adult life. That word play just strikes me as funny - here I am preaching what I encourage people to practice. When I pray Thy Will Be Done, I guess God takes that seriously because God needs all hands on deck to make earth a little more like heaven. Creating a new earth, a new way, includes moving God into your own personal neighborhood and actually doing what He calls you to do. So here I am. Doing uncomfortable again for the millionth time but behind a pulpit today. Who knew?

In my line of work, I find myself saying a lot - “Be it any kind of struggle that we face - physical pain, emotional pain, loss or trauma - we, as a species are built to struggle, but we are not built to struggle alone.” It’s why we gather at funerals, share our concerns in this sanctuary or we feel moved to just sit with others in their darkest hours. Shoving down our stories, our feelings, hiding our pain, our hurt, our fear and carrying it alone never ends well for us or the people in our lives because what we carry - often in shame-filled secrecy - will make its way up and out in not-so-great-ways if we never address it. There’s no place in the Bible that recommends turning our pain inward and never letting God or others help us work through what has hurt us. However, you can find a lot on doing the opposite. Just goggle what the bible says about supporting each other and you’ll get a lot of hits. 

We are built for joy too and the feeling of joy is so much better when we share that with others as well. It’s why we celebrate at birthdays and weddings and high five strangers at sporting events when our team wins or if Dallas loses (Philly born and bred so I had to go there). In joy, many times we sing together too - think “Happy Birthday” and “Fly Eagles Fly” - as a means to celebrate, gather and connect. Even when our singing isn’t so great, we don’t care because we’re in joy together and connected by what we’re commonly feeling. Joy, happiness, contentment and peace are the easy-to-hold feelings that help us appreciate what really matters and these feelings also provide healing. If you deposit the memories associated with these feelings into your good times internal emotional piggy bank, you can tap into that bank when things get hard.

We have a magnificent and miraculous emotional world within us that’s designed to allow us to experience the full spectrum of life through what we feel. And feeling is what draws us to connect and get it right with each other, ourselves and God. Feelings- whether the feelings are hard to hold or easy to hold - act as guide posts and are integral to our physical, mental and emotional healing. Recognizing what we’re feeling or not feeling and why can clue us in on what’s going on and teach us how to move forward towards recovery and healing. And you’ve gotta dive into your emotional world to do that work. If you don’t, it’s very hard to live out Jesus’s command to love one another when you don’t have a good handle on what self love, child-of-God love really is. It’s hard to be present with the love inside you and the love all around you when you’re just trying to keep your head above water in the murky pool of unresolved pain and grabbing hold of things you think may help but only take you down deeper.

Accessing our emotional being - this amazing gift from God - is how we humans heal from what has hurt us. That means, we choose to be vulnerable (which by the way…being vulnerable is an act of bravery) by sharing key parts of our inner world - no matter how scary that may be - with a safe person to help us process what has hurt us. I liken that to choosing to jump out of an airplane wearing a parachute that your traveling companion says will open but they’re not actually jumping with you. Yikes.

But, free falling to some degree, is the only way to fling off the caked on mud of unresolved pain to uncover the love that’s been with you all along. It’s the only way we can bring about healing to get to a better place, create a new tomorrow, a new world, a new earth - kinda like everything new that we just heard about in the book of Revelation. We may not always stick the landing, but we will land - hopefully with all our teeth intact. When we learn by jumping that we can survive doing hard, we come to realize we were never permanently broken - even when some people in our lives or in this world tell us repeatedly that we are. How freeing to know we no longer need to lead with our unresolved pain and hurt but lead with the truth and love inside us - that we ALL are children of a loving God. Period. With hard, hard work and the help of God and others, we can unshackle ourselves from the lies we’ve been fed about our worth and learn to live a better way. We all can choose to live out our birthright, the way God intended for us, all for Him by remembering He loves us and we are to love everyone here on earth as it is in heaven. 

There’s a beautiful book called, “Permission to Feel”, written by Dr. Marc Brackett. He’s the Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and his work in this field has made its way into schools, workplaces and treatment centers. Dr. Brackett experienced repeated abuse as a child (which is called complex trauma) and in response to his suffering as a child and lacking in meaningful support, became numb to how he felt. Feeling just hurt too much, was too confusing and going into emotional lockdown was how he survived. “And then,” he writes, “A miracle took place and his name was Uncle Marvin.” Dr. Brackett explains that Uncle Marvin was the first adult who managed to see him, listen to him and recognize that something was wrong and that he was suffering. His healing began the day his Uncle Marvin asked him, “Marc, how are you feeling?” Dr Brackett writes, “With those words, a damn inside me broke, and out came the torrent. Every horrible thing I was experiencing at the time and every feeling I had in response, all came tumbling out in a rush. That one little question was all it took to change my life. It wasn’t just what he said, it was the way he said it. Truly wanting to hear the answer. Not judging me for what I felt. He just listened, openly and with empathy, to what I was expressing. He didn’t try to interpret me or explain me. Uncle Marvin just listened. He heard me out. My uncle was the first person who had ever chosen not to focus on my outward behavior- snarky, withdrawn, defiant, definitely unpleasant to be around - and instead sensed that something else was going on, something significant that no one, not even I, had acknowledged. Uncle Marvin gave me permission to feel.”

Does this approach sound familiar to you? Did you or do you have an Uncle Marvin in your life? Maybe there was an Uncle Marvin or maybe not but either way, Jesus on earth was our Uncle Marvin…on steroids. Throughout all our moments Jesus is still our Uncle Marvin to this day. Jesus asked why are you here, why do you cry, why are you scared, why are you hurting, why do you say that, why do you worry, why don’t you trust, why hide your Light….what happened to you (even when he already knew the answer he needed to hear it from you). Jesus knew the way towards healing was to see people, hear people, seek to understand them, and hold all of it with reverence just like God holds us in the palm of his hand. Jesus took an interest in our stories no matter how that story began or ended. Why? Because our stories reveal what keeps us from seeing ourselves as deserving children of a loving God and so every facet of our individual and collective stories matter. That’s why all of it mattered and matters - to this day - so much to Jesus.

So I do my best to pick up what Jesus continually put down - This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you and here’s the Jesus version of what that actually looks like: I’ve got you, what happened to you, why, why not, I see you - all of you - the messy and the magical. I understand because here I am in human form too, feeling it all with you and I love you nonetheless because you are a child of God. So how about we try to ask ‘why’ more and judge less because judging doesn’t lead to healing. Seeking to understand ourselves, others, our relationships and our relationship with God is the way to healing. And you can’t do any of that without feeling.

Many years ago, I was listening to podcast where Oprah was interviewing Denzel Washington and he was talking about reading through the Bible from beginning to end. He explained that every time he’s done so, he learns something new and sees things with a greater understanding. I didn’t have the time to read the Bible from beginning to end again before today, but I did read through the gospels with a different set of eyes - those eyes being - what can I learn about how Jesus navigated his own mental and emotional well-being as God in human form? If God’s given us these internal worlds as a means to connect and love like Jesus did, what feelings were evident that Jesus experienced in his earthly life?

Well…Jesus felt disappointed, exhausted, spent and frustrated. Jesus walked away. Jesus felt inspired, proud, touched and at ease. Jesus was gracious. Jesus felt down, disheartened, troubled, and lonely. Jesus wept. Jesus felt stressed, furious, livid and enraged. Jesus got angry. Jesus held folks accountable. Jesus felt optimistic inspired, motivated and pleased. Jesus was faithful. Jesus felt at peace, content and loving. Jesus encouraged. Jesus was kind. Jesus wanted to be in the presence of others and in solitude sometimes. Jesus was skeptical. Jesus was moved. Jesus broke bread with everyone. But mostly, I saw that Jesus did all his feeling in communion with others or in communion between just he and God.

Jesus felt it all and was pretty clear about what he was feeling too which moved him into action. Because that’s what feelings have the power to do - move us into action to do something, support someone else, ask for help, ask for forgiveness and strive to be understood so each and every one of us can get to a better place, live out our purpose, learn a better way and move closer to God. Jesus tapped into what he felt to teach us about how to be human which means to feel it all and never, ever give up hope or faith in God, ourselves, others and our individual and combined abilities. God could not be any clearer about the fact that we will struggle and we absolutely need to support each other when the struggle gets very, very real. Our stories of pain or abuse or the mental health challenges we carry will always be with us and managing the symptoms of those things is a life long endeavor. Symptom management begins with stepping forward, pulling our pain out of the darkness within us, telling a safe, trusted person or professional “What happened to us” and seeing our story be held with reverence - no matter how messy it can get. Telling our story is the first step we take on our path towards healing. So with the love from our God, our people and a seed of faith tucked in your pocket, you can do incredibly hard. You can do what you thought was impossible.

It gets ugly doing hard. Giving birth to new life, a new perspective, new habits and relinquishing our not-so-great coping skills gets messy. So who can you lean on, talk to, who’s safe, who affirms you, listens to you, shows up, who says “dang look at you go” and who cheers you on when you pull yourself up off the floor?” As Christian we know that “Who” is always God. And sometimes that person has been just me, or sometimes that person could be just you - God working through you and me until that person comes to see and feel the Light within themselves and learns exactly where to find others beings who do the best they can to lead with their Light too.

So where do we begin?” Then Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." I suppose that means we can all find our way out of the darkness and all of us are capable of taking that difficult path because of that seed we carry in our pocket and because we know we never ever have to do it alone. To make everything new for the glory of God, we water our seed of hope and we feel it all and love like Jesus loved and accept that Jesus made that look easy and that it’s not so easy for us all the time. So, maybe a good place to start that wouldn’t be so terribly hard would be to love and feel and connect like Jesus did by asking others: What happened to you? How are you feeling? How are you doing? I want to know your story because your story - just like you - really matters to me. Oh, and you know what? Your story really matters to Jesus too.

Brackett, Marc, Ph.D., (2019).  Permission to Feel:  Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help our Kids, Ourselves, and our Society Thrive.  New York, NY: Celadon Books.