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

Leading Through Doubt

Many years ago, I traveled to a developing country as part of a student mission trip. While there, we slept in a dormitory that shut the electricity off each night around 10:00 pm. Several evenings we returned late and were only able to navigate the pitch-black hallways by running our hands along the walls, as my friends and I each tried to find the doorknobs for our assigned rooms. We were already in a foreign and unfamiliar place, but the intense darkness made it even more disorienting.

Early in our family’s mental illness journey, there were many days and nights when I felt like I was stuck in a similar dark and disorienting hallway, trying to find the right door handle that would open to the help and light we needed. I felt lost and uncertain, paralyzed out of fear of doing the wrong thing for our family, but particularly for Stacee’s deteriorating mental health.

Throughout your family’s mental illness journey, doubt will often be your unwanted companion. Uncertainty will make you wonder if you are doing the right thing. Questions from peers and friends can lead to indecision and discouragement. A lack of progress may cause you to doubt yourself, your loved one, or even God.

Men, when we are confident, we lead. The mental illness your loved one is battling will do its best to undercut your confidence, but your family needs you to lead now more than ever. When you find yourself doubting in the dark hallways of uncertainty and hesitation, remember that God is with you and God is for you and your family.

Through even the darkest of nights, God will lead you as you trust him. God’s goodness, mercy, and love will accompany you through the ups and downs of your family’s journey to getting better and to restored mental health. Recovery is not a straight line, and while you may not know each step of the process, you can lead and support your family to do the next right thing.

Jeremiah 29:11-14 tells us the Lord’s plans for us are good, giving us hope and a good future. God goes on to further promise that even when all surrounding you seems dark, if you seek Him, you will find Him. God is not hiding in the darkness from you.

We often forget, though, the context of these great promises. The prophet Jeremiah is writing these words to the people of God at the front edge of seventy years of exile from their homeland. Their trial was just beginning, and yet at the start of that long journey, God is promising His people goodness, hope, a bright future, and, most of all, Himself.

Wherever you find yourself in the midst of your family’s trial, He promises you the same goodness, hope, and guarantee of His presence. I have no idea how long your family’s mental illness journey may last. I join you in praying for your loved one’s quick and full recovery, but regardless of the length of the battle, God’s promises in Jeremiah 29:11-14 are just as real and true.

Friend, we can lead when we find ourselves in dark and uncertain places because God is for us and walking with us. We can lead in confidence knowing we are not walking deeper into the night, but we are walking with Him towards the dawn.