Js Park Quotes

The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken.'"[21]

And God's Will, in the end, wasn't so much about what they were doing, but the kind of person they were becoming.

If you're only thinking, It's evangelism time! —you might become one of those insensitive doctrine-nerds that overcomplicates things while firing off apologetics to "win" people.  But you're a real human being with a story, dealing with other real human beings who have stories. So, what's your story? How did God save you? Maybe you went to church your whole life, and then suddenly God knocked you out of the pew into His total grace and you started feeding the homeless and reading to blind kids. Or maybe you were doing black tar heroin, punching cops in the face while throwing puppies out of a moving vehicle, and Jesus uppercut you in your soul. Either way, you were saved. You have a testimony.

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us."[21] — Donald Miller

My faith burns slower, more methodical, seated in the back, plagued with questions, desperate in prayer, trusting those rare moments when Christ is fully visible.

Right now in your neighborhood, there is 1) a dude who doesn't know the awesomeness of marriage with a woman, 2) a fifteen year old pregnant girl who feels like she only has one option, and 3) a confused kid who can't think for himself on the origin of life because both sides are yelling in his face. What these three people are not doing is thinking of church as the place with all the answers, because most of us have been one-sided narrow-minded jerks.

don't know how to do this. To be friends with the depressed person is a bit of a dance with mashed toes. No one quite knows what they're doing, and we need more rest than the others, but we are trying.

But you know, I keep serving anyway. I keep acting like God exists. I keep loving people. I keep obeying His commands, as far-away as they feel. I force myself into the church community. I put my tiny little shred of faith into His Son. I pray, even if it's a few words at night. I read Scripture, my heavy head on a pillow as the app shines its tiny little screen into the darkness. And most days, that meager little mustard-seed-faith is just enough.

We often demand of people what only God can give us — encouragement, affirmation, strength, motivation — and we end up wringing others dry. It's okay to expect some things from people, so long as you know they're just human beings who thirst like you. They need an Infinite Well as much as you do. If you drink deeply of Him first, you'll be less controlled (and controlling) by your expectations, and you'll actually seek others not to squeeze from them but to encourage them by your overflow.

Before thinking about relationships, we're designed to have relational intimacy with God.

If depression robs you of your ability to make sense of life, then any advice or solution is not going to reach into the heart of depression.

I wish I could say it gets easier each time, but I never know how long it's going to be. I never know when the colors will come back. I never know if this will be the one that wins.

The Church isn't talking about mental illness. We have amazing secular organizations fighting stigma—and I absolutely love it. But what are we as Christians doing to help those who are hurting? A sermon on God's love won't do the trick. As much as I adore God and love Scripture, a Bible quote isn't going to do the trick. We need hearts poured out for each other. We need true and authentic encounters.

1) When it's expressed, it's often hand-waved as nothing more than "sadness" or "introversion" or "laziness." 2) Unless someone has experienced depression, then reaching out is usually ineffectual. It's like describing the Mojave to a polar bear.

In depression you become, in your head, two-dimensional—like a drawing rather than a living, breathing creature. You cannot conjure your actual personality, which you can remember only vaguely ... You live in, or close to, a state of perpetual fear, although you are not sure what it is you are afraid of.

You are loved. You might have heard that a million times, but it's no less true. You do have a Creator. He is with you. He is bigger than your situation and closer than your deepest hurt. He's not mad. He is cheering for you and rooting for you this very second. He's okay about all the things before. He sent His Son for that very reason. You can put down the blade. You can throw away the pills. You can quit replaying those regrets in your head. You can quit the inner-loop of self-condemnation. You can forget your ex. You can walk away from the porn. You can resolve your conflicts right now. You can sign up to volunteer at that shelter. You can thank your parents for everything. You can hug the person next to you. You can tell the waiter, "Jesus loves you." You can go back to church. You don't have to sit in the back. You don't have to prove your worth to the people you've let down. You don't have to live up to everyone else's vision for your life. You're finally, finally free. You are loved. I am loved. As much as I love you, dear friend, He loves you infinitely more. Believe it. Walk in it. Walk with Him. God is in the business of breathing life into hurting places. This is what He does, even for the least likely like you and me.

Speeding through grief always has a cost. To bury somebody's supposed-to-be is also to bury a story that's untold. When you bury someone's story like that, it gets lodged in the ribcage, it gets radioactive, it festers, it shouts to be heard. Grief is always a voice that needs to speak. If you suppress it, it still speaks— but not always in ways that are healthy. Not in the ways you need. It pushes through your skin like rogue splinters. Burying a future loss without telling its story can make you sick. Timesick. You get split between timelines. The further along you go, the further away you get from that dream, and you look around and wonder how people can keep going while you want the world to stop, time to freeze, to get back to your real universe. And you get well-meaning people around you, always the ones who mean well, who are nudging you forward, shoving you, really, and you clutch two timelines until you're ripped in half. Part of my role as a chaplain, I've learned, is to make room for these original timelines. That they may be spoken, shared. The story told. "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you, Zora Neale Hurston said. It must be conversely true that there is no greater peace than to tell that story.

earnest Christians assume that this relationship or this job or this house is the one that God really has for them, so they invest their entire heart into these things.  But at any moment, our idea of the future can be upturned.

It's unfair to use "God's Will" as an excuse to quit, but also unfair to use it as an iron grip to endure past an expiration date.  Both of these are equally dangerous errors.

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer."[42]

We were enduring the consequences of poorly made decisions. We had no idea how to help our friends go through their terrible trials. We were disappointed weekly by the church's avoidance of tough topics, or the black-and-white binary boxes. The church gave us cat-poster clichés or pulpit-pounding guilt-trips. So we adopted the self-improvement techniques of culture, which turned out to be self-improvisation, and it only made us worse.

She could see a police car zooming into the parking lot and she ushered with her hands like a bullfighter on a runway that had lost his cape, but needed to get out of Spain to atone for his sins

My favourite letter, of all the ones I have received. "Hello. I cried in a museum in front of a Gaugin painting - because somehow he had managed to paint a transparent pink dress. I could almost see the dress wafting in the hot breeze. I cried at the Louvre in front of Victory. She had no arms, but she was so tall. I cried (so hard I had to leave) at a little concern where a young man played solo cello Bach suites. It was in a weird little Methodist church and there were only about fifteen of us in the audience, the cellist alone on the stage. It was midday. I cried because (I guess) I was overcome with love. It was impossible for me to shake the sensation (mental, physical) that J.S. Bach was in the room with me, and I loved him. These three instances (and the others I am now recollecting) I think have something to do with loneliness… a kind of craving for the company of beauty. Others, I suppose, might say God. But this feels too simple a response. Robin Parks

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets."[16] — C.S. Lewis If you're either at the edge of depression or thinking of harming yourself right now, please don't hesitate to call a friend. If they don't answer, leave a long message. You might be surprised that it helps. Also,

I dislike having to justify my depression because I don't always display symptoms of depression. If I have a good day or if I'm able to laugh or seem happy, I find people often think that my depression isn't a real illness, or that I can simply have a positive attitude and it will go away. I have good days and bad days, but it is still always there, just like any other chronic illness.

You cannot choose whether you get depressed and you cannot choose when or how you get better, but you can choose what to do with the depression, especially when you come out of it."[54] — Andrew Solomon

You're not alone, you have me.

Take anyone who is an over-confident showman or who talks in “teacher tones” or who gets mad when they hear that they’re wrong, and most of the time they’re just afraid.

The little voice keeps accusing me, Around the corner they’ll find out you barely know what you’re doing.

Hate feels like winning but it scorches the soil and starves the earth. Grace is the only seed that will bloom.

I thought I was alone in this, but about seven out of ten people feel like they’re faking their way through the world, like their accomplishments are tainted.16 And the more the success, the greater the pressure to measure up to the applause. All the trophies and medals and awards get spun on a stick, announcing a version of you that’s mostly spin.

We've been the idea that depression is only a choice, that somehow we've chosen our way in and can choose our way out. We're inclined to deflect the burden rather than to share it.

After she threatened to beat me with her belt I just decided it was safer to park and hike.

Another respondent said, "I used to believe self-care and coddling were synonymous, that the best way of curing depression was to stay as far inside my comfort zone as possible. Stay in, watch my favorite movies over and over, binge on desserts, don't put any effort into anything that might 'exhaust' me. Then I realized I had already committed suicide, by refusing to live. Now, I get out of depression by doing new things with new people, taking risks, putting in effort on big and small things. Long story short, huddling inside a blanket eating ice cream may be comforting enough for one day, but it's not the way your whole life should be led.

It wasn't until I sat with patient after patient, from emergency room to deathbed, that I saw what they saw: In their illness or injury, I saw a memory loss of the future. This is called intrapsychic grief, the pain of losing what will never be, the reaching for something that was supposed to happen. This intrapsychic grief is a specific but universal ache.

She asks me, "How do you grieve someone you never met?" With each patient, I hear similar questions. It keeps emerging, this pulse. It presses in every room, leans on every shoulder, demands an answer: How do you grieve future loss? Underneath that, more questions: How do you deal with the viciousness of a broken dream? How do you move on from the picture of life in your head? How do you keep moving through a parallel-universe life? My patients suffer from good dreams. What I mean is, it's not the nightmares that keep them up. It's the hope. Daydreams of another life. Instead of homesick, they're timesick. Before becoming a chaplain, I thought grief was about missing the past. About reflecting on all the things before, the stuff we had until mortality crawled through the window. It's true. We grieve the past. But mostly no one gets a chance to grieve the future. It doesn't seem to read as a real loss. I need to tell you about this because nobody told me: The dream that didn't happen is as much of a loss as losing the one that did.

While working on the book, I learned there was a clinical term for this pain about a lost future: intrapsychic grief, which the hospital chaplain and writer J.S. Park describes as “grieving what could have been and will never be.

Grace is thoughtful. It considers a back-story, an upbringing, the entire person, and not just a tiny single slice of their life.

Depression is a rumor, until it is reality, and then it's as if nothing else was ever real.

It is remarkably invasive, a highly honed, weaponized virus of the mind.

Depression itself is encased in misconceptions. The pain of going through mental illness is already hard enough; to add myths only makes it that much more unbearable.

Unless someone has experienced depression, then reaching out is usually ineffectual. It's like describing the Mojave to a polar bear.

Depression thrives on its unrelenting invisibility, creating a fatal cycle in which its own camouflage is the very mechanism by which it destroys. It thrives by hiding.

It feels like forever while it's there and as though it never happened when it's over.

God made the world out of nothing, and as long as we are nothing, He can make something out of us." — Martin Luther