Carrying Hope: Encouragement for Men Who Love Someone Struggling With Mental HealthSample

Set you Anchor

“It’s like a bomb has gone off in our family!”

I will never forget those words or the rugged man who choked them out between his tears. We sat together in a support group session for family members at one of the top eating disorder treatment facilities in the country. A week earlier, his daughter’s eating disorder had quickly led to a medical emergency. She had spent a week in a hospital Intensive Care Unit to medically stabilize before transferring to the same eating disorder program where my wife was also a patient.

His heart-wrenchingly honest cry conveyed what we were all feeling – that stunned and shocked uncertainty, seemingly out of nowhere, shaking the foundations of our families and our lives. For that man and most of us in that group, our lives had only recently been peaceful and predictable, but now this hurricane had struck suddenly, and his daughter and my wife were both at grave risk.

When the storms of life come, where do you set your anchor? Mental illness, in all of its various shapes and forms, is a sinister and cruel disease, sometimes resulting from years of trauma and other times striking from what seems without reason. You may have seen these storm clouds of your loved one’s mental illness brewing on the horizon for some time, or possibly your loved one’s mental illness struggle has hit like a sudden tornado dropping out of the sky with little warning.

However this storm has hit, mental illness has likely rocked your family’s world. To survive this storm, you need an anchor, your family needs an anchor, in the midst of the crisis, to hold you fast no matter how strong these winds blow.

The first Psalm provides a vision of the man who sets his anchor in the Word, truth and hope of God. He is like a tree planted by a river – his roots run deep, his trunk is firm and strong, and he produces fruit regardless of season, drought, or storm. “His leaf does not wither – whatever they do prospers” (Psalm 1:3, NIV).

Jesus makes a similar promise as he concludes his most famous sermon, The Sermon on the Mount: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock” (Matthew 7:24-25, NIV).

Friend, wherever you are in this storm, set your anchor in the Truth of God’s Word. Put God’s Truth into your heart and mind; speak and pray God’s Word over your loved one and their struggle. Only this anchor can be the hope that holds you and your family secure.