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Mental Health and Wellbeing during a Time of Uncertainty
In this time of uncertainty, it is even more important to pay attention to our mental health and wellbeing, checking our blind spots and being honest with ourselves and others. It is this honesty that make Rob Merchant’s Broken By Fear, Anchored In Hope such an important book for this season. Here, Rachael Bell and Simon Ponsonby share their thoughts the book.
“At some point in most of our lives, something unpleasant will take us down, or at least, knock us off our perch. Make sure you have this book on your shelves for when it happens to you, or your loved ones!
This is a steady, quotidian and unflinching book about trauma, despair, fear, healing and hope; it is definitely not one of those dramatic, fairy-tale, all-cleaned-up ever-after stories. This book is a testament to journey and process.
In a Christian culture swamped with testimonies of Instant Fix, it is so important that we also hear the stories of hard-won, incremental and even cyclical progress. All too often our excitement and celebration of the “fix - it” theology can almost come to undermine the equally valid and Godly step-by-step trajectory - much more analogous to all the “growing" or “building” metaphors which pervade scripture.
Equally pressing and counter-cultural, this book is long overdue in a world, and tragically often even a Christian culture, which is driven by doing and achieving. It would be fascinating to find out how many Christian books written in the last 20 years tell us either what to do or what others have done. But for many, the hardships, challenges and cruelties in life mean that, like the apostle Paul in the day of evil, in fact, all you can manage and all that is required of you is to simply “stand” - right there in the dark pit and the miry clay. It is messy, unglamorous and invariably swamped in shame, and that is the point. This book works out in blood, sweat and tears what the writer of Hebrews is referring to when he says, “Let us then go to him, outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore”. Not by choice, but thrown there by trauma, Rob shares how he is learning to be, to wait or to “stand” in the pit - with the help and encouragement of others - until he is rescued.
Finally, there is his glorious, radiant and breath-taking conversion encounter, set appropriately enough in the “woodwork room” which puts all the very broken human travail into a whole other context and firmly sets this book apart from any of the usual self-help or self-acceptance manuals, because as Rob says, “the one who calls us is faithful, and our journey home is to him.” Rob must have avoided writing this for a long time; it takes serious guts to be this vulnerable, even with a confidante, let alone going public in a book. My prayer is that the church in the West really gets Rob’s lessons into its cultural DNA, because sadly, at the moment, we often make it even worse for those who are actually in this place.”
- Rachael Bell
“AT LAST. A book that gets it. As a long-term sufferer of anxiety and depression, I have manned up and broken down; I have been to the doctors and the ghost busters; I’ve been inner healed and I’ve walked by faith; I’ve renounced and I’ve pronounced. I have stood on the promises and stamped on the Devil. But still the shadows have come, and I have been led down the overgrown mental mazes, and the panic and paralysis have set in.
It's difficult to explain to those who haven’t dragged that place around with them But Rob Merchant knows it well - and he has learnt to understand its where and why - and he has by the grace of God, and the grace of loved ones and expert ones - come to know himself and to move forward, limping, yes, but moving nonetheless. And Jesus has been there, and is there, and will be there for Rob and so with the comfort he’s received he comforts others.
This brave book is full of help and full of hope, precisely because Rob Merchant is vulnerable and shares all, and because he doesn’t offer a quick fix elixir for peace of mind, nor a how-to manual on walking into complete freedom, nor some incredible, and not credible, testimony of how it was once a living hell but everything is now hunky dory. No, Rob just tells it as it is, articulately expressing where many of us go - and its real and raw and awful…but the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness, though it overshadows, does not overcome. This is a book for sufferers of mental illness, and for those who journey with sufferers, and for pastors who seek to minister to sufferers. Beautiful. Bravo Rob.”
- Simon Ponsonby
Drawing on his own experience, Rob shows how healing starts when we acknowledge and accept our vulnerability. Knowing our place before God and surrendering wholly to Christ, we can discover forgiveness and always find hope.
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