Hi everyone!
Psalm 62:1 says, “Truly my soul finds rest in God; my salvation comes from Him.” We pray that in the midst in the messiness of life, and especially in interpersonal and institutional conflicts, you are able to find rest this Lent in the one who holds all things together. It has been a helpful reminder for us from Faith Unleavened that God doesn’t abandon us in the difficulties. It’s often where he does his best work.
And with that, on to our recommendations for the week.
Sy’s recommendations:
This one comes to you from God is My Special Interest, one of our recommended publications on Substack. It focuses on neurodivergence and religion. This post from Tuesday is by Aly Prades, a woman who grew up in evangelicalism with undiagnosed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. She writes in vivid detail about how the overemphasis on sin, guilt, and shame at her church led her to become obsessed with her own failings and with regimented religious activity. She explains how she began to heal when someone finally asked her about the unrelenting voice of critique in her head: “What if it’s not God?” This article gives us another angle on two truths Tamice describes in Faith Unleavened. First, love for God cannot begin with fear of doing or being wrong. Second, Churches are often places where the symptoms of psychological trauma like Prade’s’ obsessive thoughts or Tamice’s disassociation are misidentified as piety, rewarded, and magnified. I pray that churches would encourage us to better understand mental health and the way our own minds work, free of theologies that are too abstract and rigid to accommodate humanity.
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