Elaina sits down with Pastor Sergei Marchenko to discuss his experience with mental illness both in his home and church. Pastor Sergei shares hope for the hurting and discussed the importance of mental health awareness in the church, and from the pulpit.
Ah, Thanksgiving. That festive time of year where we gather around the table with family, friends, or those who are like family to us to share in a feast of turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie and all the foods that can fit on one plate and then some. While Thanksgiving can be about the food and the endless hours of football on television, it also provides us an opportunity to give thanks to God for the blessings we have experienced in life.
Elaina sits down and talks with Lisa Jamieson from Walk Right In Ministries about family caregivers, the holidays, and ways the church can better support them.
The training, content, gatherings and experiences that we’ve created for pastors, church staff and ministry volunteers produced with the assistance of like-minded colleagues serving in disability ministry have become our principal service. So much of what we’re able do to help churches welcome and support families, we accomplish by bringing together experts from other ministry organizations.
November is Caregiver Awareness Month. As someone who became one of my dad’s caregivers before I started school, I grew up thinking everyone in the world was aware of caregivers and caregiving. As a young adult my husband and I cared for a son born with a life-threatening medical condition, and his typical sibling. As members of the sandwich generation, my brother, sister, and I cared for our mother for 15 years after she was diagnosed with dementia. This explains why, when I first heard that November is Caregiver Awareness Month, I was incredulous, and I still am.
This summer in the United States, we have seen an uptick in violence. Within this wave of crisis, we have seen many people want to identify why we are having problems. Important research results have recenlty come out which further support the need for mental health awareness around violence, as well as not shifting the blame to those who are different and therefore must be the problem.
God is the master director and storyteller. The most important story, of how He works with humanity and how He came to rescue humanity as fully God and fully human is of course the Big Story. But the Big Story is full of trillions of lesser stories. And I’m convinced the lesser stories mostly revolve around God breaking through the illusions we have in our lives.
Is it possible that God might be using mental health concerns as an instrument for bringing about the salvation of those affected? What if God plans to use someone’s mental health condition…or the condition of a loved one as the means of connecting them with individuals and churches positioned to introduce them to the Gospel?
EVIL is the root cause of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the shootings in churches in rural Texas, Nashville, and several years ago, at an historically African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. As a society, we seek to minimize the existence of evil because recognition of evil threatens our shared delusion that any absolute standard of right and wrong exists.
