At the beginning of May, I had hoped that I would get these book recommendations shared while it was still Mental Health Month. But, it was a month of deep, dark places for me mentally and emotionally, and it just didn’t happen.

I have a few books I have read in past few months that I recommend, but will only include one in this post. Along with the link to one of my very favorite songs (of course it is Hillsong).

A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ (John Andrew Bryant)

I started this book in January and didn’t finish it until the end of April (it must be read slowly, or you will be undone)––at the same time that pieces of my solid, stable world cracked. These pages are from a man who knows what it is like to suffer deeply––and yet hang onto Jesus through it all. Although I couldn’t relate to his particular diagnoses, so much of what he said resonated deeply with my heart and soul. John writes from the heart…there is no glossing over anything or sanitizing his words and feelings to be “presentable” to his readers. It is authors like him that I want to listen to, because I know that they truly get suffering.

Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

Here are my top 20 quotes (read through Kindle, so page #s reflect that numbering):

1. It has been important for me over the years to not understand a mental illness as a character flaw or a lack of faith when it is simply an Affliction, a kind of Suffering among other kinds of Suffering (17).
2. I love Jesus and am still very much mentally ill. My love for Jesus has not fixed that. And Jesus’ love for me has not fixed it either (18).
3. It turns out even the horrors I can be made to see and feel can be turned into a time of patient waiting on the Mercy offered in the gospel, with the promise we will not be most changed by the horrors we’ve been made to see and feel, but by the Mercy we’ve waited on. And this patient, quiet understanding, though it cannot remove those symptoms, can make every intrusive thought, every grotesque feeling, a time of patient waiting on the Mercy that has been offered. Every horrible thing can become a prayer (26).
4. Memory needs a shepherd. Otherwise it has tremendous power to deform. It has been my experience that only Christ knows what to do with Memory, how to shepherd and consecrate it by His Word. Only He can make it transfigure us (39).
5. Because He kept the scars, because He can be trusted with what has been taken from us, because what is seen and felt and done and taken is now His body, we know the Past and this Affliction, without ceasing to be the horrible thing that it is, is not the final Word or the End of the World and does not get to tell us everything about ourselves (46).
6. There may come a day when because of this awful life we cannot be a good mother, a good father, a CEO, an athlete, or a friend. There may come a day when we cannot be sane or capable, when we cannot be stable. But there will never come a day when we cannot be a Christian. Because a Christian is someone who depends on Christ, who can be quietly changed by depending on Him. We are assured that to depend on Christ is to be given Christ, utterly and completely (68).
7. In order to get along, to be present in my own life, to worship regularly, to love somewhat well and somehow get through the day, I have been called to enact by Christ a trust that feels like dying. A patient, quiet trust that feels wrong just as often as it feels right. I have learned, and am still learning, that trusting Christ is one of the ugliest and most uncomfortable things we’ll ever do (70).
8. Every deeper revelation of who Christ was was the deeper revelation of who I was, and the revelation was always that I was more limited and vulnerable than I thought (87).
9. “This day is awful,” I once wrote in my journal. “But this day is more than awful. It is also Christ’s” (87).
10. “Try not to worry.” Did they not understand what worry is? That it doesn’t feel like something you’re doing? That it feels like wolves at the door? That this kind of excruciating worry is an experience provided by the brain? A storm you can’t control, an avalanche you stand helpless under? That when they say, “Try not to worry,” what they are saying is, “Try not to be eaten by wolves”? (106).
11. The devil is not afraid of the talented and the rich, of the beautiful or the witty or the capable. He is afraid that beggars might hear something. He is afraid of our inheritance. He is afraid of the hearing of the gospel. He is afraid we might hear who Christ is (115).
12. “In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” I’ve thought about this verse a lot. In 1 Peter there are only two things mentioned as precious: the shed blood of Christ and our trust (120).
13. Christ’s silence, I would learn again and again, was not His absence (137).
14. Our first priority is not to defeat sin but to behold the Christ who has defeated sin (151).
15. Through an Ordinary Life of Regular Worship I slowly began to understand that every beautiful, dull, horrible moment was one in which Christ could be depended on. And that every beautiful, dull, horrible thing could deepen our life in Christ (158).
16. There is something worse than the experience of shame and fear. And it is our addiction to handling it ourselves (179).
17. The reason so few of us grow in our life in Christ is because it is so painful. There is no growth to our dependence on Christ that is not also a wound to our dependence on self (179).
18. We think Christ is honored by what we think and feel. But Christ is honored by what we trust him with (182).
19. All I could be is with Christ. And it was all I needed to be (198).
20. The Lord had not committed Himself to my plans. He had committed Himself to my freedom (226).