Mental Health for Men: Finding Rest

Masculinity And Mental Health

Yeah well, it is a huge joy for me to be here. Thanks so much for coming out and for thinking about this really crucial topic. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to engage with mental health? And how does the grace of God connect with us in that space?

As important as this topic is, I think you’d also agree with me that, in some ways, it can be quite vague. What are we really talking about when we use some of these terms? What does it really mean to be a man? What does mental health actually mean? I mean, we hear it a lot, but what does it actually mean? And how does that connect with the Bible and with God and what God says? Sometimes, it seems like those things are in different worlds.

You might hear about mental health at school, at varsity, or online, or at work. But if you open up the Bible, you won’t find the term “mental health.” So, how does it actually connect with Scripture?

I actually think there is huge potential in every local church— inherent in how we have a relationship with God and what local churches do to help men with their mental health. But one of the goals today is to figure out what we mean by that.
So, one of the things we’re going to do with each session is look at a Psalm and think a little bit about how those Psalms connect with this topic. Because one of my big goals today is to try and help you build connections between some of these topics that we hear about and the Word of God.

So, if you have a Bible, would you please turn to Psalm 8? That’s the first one we’ll look at. In this first talk, we’ll be thinking about masculinity, mental health, and grace, at an overview level. And then we’ll have a discussion about toxic masculinity, then we’ll have tea after that. Then after that, we’ll reflect on how to pray when we feel like giving up. We’ll end the day with some Q&A and how local churches can help us.
But before we begin, it would be good to start with God’s word. I’ll read Psalm 8 and pray, and then we’ll jump in. I’m using the NIV.

Psalm 8 (NIV)
For the director of music. According to Gittith. A psalm of David.
“Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory in the heavens.
Through the praise of children and infants,
you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
to silence the foe and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim in the paths of the seas.
Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:1-9)

This is the word of God.

Let me pray quickly.

Heavenly Father, as we come to you and as we sit under your word, we pray that you would help us understand what it means to be men, what it means to engage with our hearts, and how our relationship with you and the grace you give us in Christ enable us to persevere in the challenges we face. Amen.

South African Statistics

Let me begin by just, uh, highlighting some of the statistics in South Africa that show us the kind of situation we’re currently in. I think it would be fair to say that men in South Africa are struggling. Men are not doing well—we are struggling.

For example, the suicide rate in South Africa is the 10th highest in the world. Men are more likely to die from suicide than women, with a ratio of 3 to 1. We’ve got a very high suicide rate for men. We have high substance abuse rates—men are more likely than women to engage in substance abuse. That often co-occurs with mental health issues, and tragically, what often happens when men start struggling with their mental health is that, instead of accessing help, we turn to substances to cope. And of course, that makes everything worse, typically.

We’ve got a high level of trauma in our country. Men are very likely, in South Africa, to suffer from violent trauma. And just like substance abuse, when you experience trauma, there is a higher chance of experiencing mental health issues. Additionally, in South Africa, we’ve got—how can we put it—maybe confused masculinity norms. We don’t know, as men, what to do with our internal struggles. We don’t know how to talk about them, and we don’t know who to talk to. That makes it less likely to access help.

Again, when we don’t find help that way, we try to find help in our own way—and that tends to be less productive and less helpful in the end. So, the situation is not great.

And even for men who are looking to find help, who are able to talk about it, and who want to talk about it, accessing help is difficult. It can be very expensive to find any kind of private mental health services. Public mental health services can be hard to find as well. And so that makes it hard—even when you want to get help – sometimes it can be difficult to.

Finally, I’d say what makes it difficult is that I think that, although churches have huge potential to help, often, because the language of mental health is very different from the language of Scripture, we don’t know how to make those connections. Sometimes, churches, I think, aren’t always reaching their full potential in offering the kind of help that we can.

So, what I want to do in this talk is try to bring some clarity into that space—because I think clarity will help us move forward and get the help we need.

I’m going to ask and answer three questions:

What does it mean to be a man?

What is mental health? What do we mean by mental health?

How does God’s grace help us? How does God’s grace actually help us?

What Does It Mean To Be A Man?

Firstly then, let’s think about what it means to be a man. We’ll begin with some of the models we see in our culture, and we’ll have a chat about this after the talk.
I think, basically, if I had to sum it up—this is a gross simplification—but in our culture, we’ve probably got two models. I think of them as the warrior and, maybe, the poet. Right?

So, the warrior is perhaps your classic strongman model of masculinity. He is tough. He can fix a broken car. He’s, you know, he’s your classic kind of South African man in that sense. That might look different in some of our various cultural groups in South Africa, but there can be a lot of overlap. You know—”Cowboys don’t cry”—that kind of thing. This is a tough kind of man.

I think, more and more, as the years have gone by, we’ve noticed some problems with that model because, you know, men do struggle. Perhaps, particularly in the last few years, there’s been a push toward being a much more sensitive man—a man much more in touch with his feelings. Again, that can go to an extreme that a lot of ordinary guys just can’t relate to. They know they have emotions, but they don’t always know what they are. There might be a willingness to go there, but it’s just—you know—those two extremes make it quite difficult to know what’s what, to know how to actually live as an ordinary guy.

So, there’s confusion around masculinity. That’s where Scripture is so helpful and where Psalm 8, I think, can provide some particular help
In Psalm 8, one of the things we learn about being a human being—a man—is that we’re made in the image of God. We’ve got strength and dignity, which is more that first model. There’s legitimacy to that. Yet, there’s also humility and weakness in being a man.

All right, if you have a Bible open, just take a look again at verse 4. You see that sense of humility and weakness in the question being asked of verse 4, hey?
“When he looks at creation, he considers the heavens and the stars. David asks, ‘What is mankind, or man, that you are mindful of him? Human beings, that you care for them?'”

He recognizes how small he is, how weak he is. How is it that the God of creation would care about me? I’m so small. I’m so weak.
And yet—verse 5—yet despite this, God has made us “a little lower than the angels and crowned us with glory and honor.” (Psalm 8:4)
When you read the creation accounts in Genesis, after each day, God declares, “It is good.” After He creates man and woman, “It is very good.” There’s something special about humanity. We’re made in the image of God—made to have dominion, made to rule.

You see that in verse 6:
“You have made them rulers over the works of your hands; you have put everything under their feet.”
I think one of the things this reminds us of is that when you have a desire to be competent—when you have a desire to be strong, to order your world, to care for your family, to work, and to provide—that’s a God-given desire.

When people govern the earth, and they govern it in righteousness and with efficiency, it’s a good thing. It’s a beautiful thing. A well-run family, a well-run organization, a well-run church—when they are well-managed, led, and governed—it’s a beautiful thing.

If we’re honest, though, we don’t always see that happening, hey? We don’t always—I mean, we know this very well in South Africa—there are various challenges, both past and present. Leaders not leading well, not leading with the welfare of others in mind, exploiting, being selfish, being unjust. Although we were created for that, it’s not often how we live. We’re not often very good at being that.

But at this point, the thing I really want to—the points I’m really trying to make here—when it comes to thinking about masculinity, can you see how the biblical worldview actually has both of these elements in it? Men have this strength, and there’s a goodness to that—an inherent goodness. It’s how we were created. And yet, men are weak. Men are small. And actually, that’s worth embracing that tension rather than resisting, right?

So, it’s not just, “Am I a warrior or a poet?” There’s a sense in which, from the Bible’s point of view, you can be both. There is a strength, and there is a vulnerability. And I think there’s wisdom in us recognizing that both of those are true of us—and recognizing that one doesn’t cancel out the other, right? It’s possible to be a strong guy, a godly guy, who wants to lead well and still be honest about our weaknesses, our vulnerability.

Realizing, “Who am I?” and what it means when I come across challenges—I’m actually going to get out of denial a little more easily because I’m going to be more willing to recognize that I am weak, that I am small in the grand scheme of things, and I need help.

I think if we embrace this tension, we’ll be able to be honest. If we don’t embrace it, it will be very hard for us to honestly engage our struggles.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever had this experience with a friend, or maybe it’s been your experience. I had a friend who lost his job and was too ashamed to tell his family. So, every day, he’d leave home and pretend to go to work. He was brave enough to share that with me, and eventually, he did share it with his family. In God’s kindness, he’s found another job, and we are very grateful for that.

But it was a reminder that if we don’t recognize both aspects of this picture of masculinity, when trouble comes, it will be hard for us to access help. It will be hard for us to talk to other people about the fact that we need help, that we’re weak, that we go through seasons of life that are difficult and overwhelming.

And so, I think we should embrace the tension and that kind of more complex picture that Psalm 8 gives us. So, what does it mean to be a man? It means to be strong and weak, right? It means to be both dignified and humble. That’s who we are. That’s what it means to be a man.

What Is Mental Health?

Okay, well, what is mental health? Let’s think about what we mean by mental health. It’s one of those words we hear a lot, but how do you actually define it? There are different ways of defining it. I’m going to share two definitions that I think are helpful. The first is from a psychologist, Dr. Maran Baker. She defines mental health this way: Mental health is the ability to cope emotionally and cognitively when we experience problems or challenges in life.

That lines up with the definition of the World Health Organization. They have a similar definition—I think I might have it on this screen, but I don’t think I have it on the screen. They say, “Mental health is a state of mental well-being that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realize their abilities, learn well, work well, and contribute to their community.”

You can see in both definitions that word ‘cope’ coming along. Mental health is the ability to cope. It speaks to a kind of wellness.

The South African Federation of Mental Health defines it this way: They say, “Your mental health refers to your emotional, psychological, and social well-being.”

Now, what it means to be well emotionally is not easy to define, actually. I think the word ‘cope’ is quite helpful. It doesn’t mean that life isn’t hard and that we don’t go through difficult seasons, but coping means I’m able to keep going.

When I struggle to cope, when I struggle to maybe get out of bed, go to work, or participate meaningfully in my relationships— in other words, when there’s a level of impairment—that’s when this is starting to move into more of a mental health problem or a mental health challenge.
It’s worth also remembering that in these definitions that mental health is referring, although it’s an embodied experience, it’s referring to a non-medical aspect of human life. It’s about coping emotionally, cognitively, coping relationally, rather than physically.

It’s quite helpful to begin with the kind of definitions we get out there in the world because we’ll move to what that looks like biblically in a moment. But let me make two other comments about mental health.

Mental health refers positively to something, to wellness. A mental health condition refers often to a psychiatric diagnosis—that’s when something’s going wrong. That’s sometimes what we call mental illness, but mental illness will have a specific psychiatric diagnosis for someone. So, there’s a level of specificity to those things.

A mental health condition is a clinically significant disturbance in someone’s functioning or, like I said a moment ago, an impairment. Now, it’s helpful to remember with these diagnoses that they do two things that are really helpful for us to be aware of. They describe something, rather than explain the cause. So, they’re a little bit different from medical diagnoses in that sense.

If you think of something like OCD, the OCD psychiatric diagnosis describes a pattern of behavior, and it’s actually very helpful to have that descriptor. It enables, you know, medical professionals to communicate with each other; it helps research and all sorts of things. What that label is not trying to do is explain why that particular person has OCD.

Now, that’s worth remembering because it’s a description, rather than an explanation. You could have two, three, or four people with the same psychiatric diagnosis, but each of them might have a different cause. So, each person is different, and the label is not trying to provide an explanation. All it’s trying to do is provide a description.

That might seem a little bit abstract, but it’s a helpful thing to remember. What it means is, practically, pastorally, and relationally, when I hear that a friend of mine has a psychiatric diagnosis, all it’s telling me is that this pattern of behavior has created a level of impairment in their life. It doesn’t tell me why. And what that means is, I still don’t know enough to probably really love them well.

So, if someone shares that with you, it’s helpful to use it as an invitation into relationship and asking questions: “How can I pray for you? Tell me a little about your story,” rather than seeing that label as a summary of the cause of that challenge for them.
So, that’s the first thing with psychiatric labels: remember that they are descriptions rather than explanations.

The second thing to remember that I think is very helpful for us is to realize that a lot of these challenges exist on a spectrum rather than on a binary. So, if you think of something like OCD, it’s an anxiety disorder. All of us know what it’s like to be anxious. Why that’s helpful is that I’m more like my friend than unlike them. I might not have anxiety to the point that it creates an impairment, but it doesn’t mean I don’t know what it’s like to be anxious.

And why that’s important is for empathy. It means I can relate to my friend. It means that if my friend has been given a diagnosis like that, suddenly they’re not in another category that I can’t ever relate to. I don’t know their experience and I can’t understand their experience, but I can think a little bit about my own struggles with anxiety, and it can help me move towards my friend: “Tell me more about your story. Tell me a little bit more about that anxiety.”

I think what that does, realizing that these labels often describe a continuum and someone gets a psychiatric label once that impairment threshold is crossed, is that it prevents a kind of “us versus them” mentality. It’s easy to think, “Okay, well in any given church, you’ve got mentally healthy people and mentally ill people, and there’s a very obvious dividing line.” That’s actually not how it works.

So, it’s helpful to just understand that these are how these terms work in the world; that’s how they’re designed to work. Some of them are a wide range of mental health conditions. Some of them you may be well aware of, and some of them describe problems that have been human problems for many years, and these are just more recent labels for them. Others are kind of newer, and some are more connected to brain function than others. So, it’s always helpful to be curious and just to kind of understand our particular experience or our friend’s experience.

Here’s the challenge: here’s one of the challenges we have as Christians. How does this world, how does this language and this conceptualization of problems, connect with God and His word?

Ed Welch puts it this way: He’s written a very helpful short book called I Have a Psychiatric Diagnosis: What Does the Bible Say? It’s a very short book, really worth reading. He puts it this way: He says,
“It’s as if there are walls between psychological problems and God’s words. Therapists and psychiatrists don’t talk about God. Scripture doesn’t have a list of psychological diagnoses. Two different worlds: one science, the other spiritual. Maybe they each have their own areas of expertise and don’t need to be bridged.”

Maybe… What we actually realize when we start looking at a lot of these challenges, and when we start looking at Scripture, is that there is a lot of overlap and a lot of resonance.

Mental health problems, in one way, are always spiritual. Let me give you two reasons why that’s true.
The first is because of that issue of resonance. Steve Midgley, who leads — he was a psychiatrist in the UK and is now a minister — he leads a group called Biblical Counseling UK. He says, “Many of the struggles that we identify as mental illness resonate with the themes of Scripture.”

Let’s stick with the anxiety example for a moment. Anxiety is one of the more common mental health disorders; it’s one of the most prevalent ones. There are variations of that, and of course, there are some extreme struggles that can be associated with anxiety. That is a struggle that the Bible actually speaks to, though, hey? Now again, we’ve got to be thoughtful about this. The Bible’s not trying to imitate a mental health manual, but Scripture recognizes the human condition.

God recognizes that people get scared. God’s word actually gives us a framework for understanding why that’s the case. The world is a scary place. The world is a dangerous place. There are sometimes very good reasons to be scared. But why that’s a good thing to remember is that if the Bible speaks to that struggle, it means that the Bible’s got good things to say to people who are struggling with anxiety.

And it’s not like we’re going to use the Bible in a sort of clinical mental health way, but it would be odd if the Bible didn’t have anything to say to someone who was struggling with anxiety when it speaks about it so often.

Here’s another example of resonance. I was thinking about that definition by Maryann Baker, the psychologist. I was then listening to a talk by a Bible teacher, Christopher Ash, on the Book of Proverbs, and her definition of mental health resonated with his definition of wisdom.

I’ve got them both up on the screen there. So, remember, her definition of mental health was: “It’s the ability to cope emotionally and cognitively when we experience problems or challenges in life.” At the beginning of Proverbs, we get a snapshot of what wisdom looks like. In his sermon on that passage, Christopher Ash said: “Wisdom is the ability to cope with the real world.”

Can you see that resonance?

Now, again, we need to be thoughtful about this. It’s not as though, if you just have more wisdom, you’ll never have mental health problems—that’s not what I’m saying. And yet, growing in wisdom will help. It will help, hey? It would be odd if it didn’t! Of course, growing in wisdom will help. Growing in wisdom won’t remove all of our struggles, but as we grow in wisdom, hopefully, we will respond to those struggles better. We’ll be able to navigate them—hopefully with more discernment.

So, that’s one of the reasons why mental health problems overlap with spiritual problems or have a spiritual component to them. There’s a strong resonance between how Scripture talks about the human condition and our modern descriptive labels for challenges in living. There’s a huge resonance there.

The second reason mental health problems are always spiritual problems is that suffering people always need God’s help. Right? Suffering people always need God’s help. The person who is struggling with their mental illness needs hope, needs power, needs endurance, needs love, needs wisdom, needs grace, needs forgiveness.

The Christian faith offers resources that are literally out of this world. Right? Struggling people need those things—those spiritual realities—which are available to us as Christians. Struggling people need help. And they need help not just from a system but from a person. And we know that that person is the Lord Jesus Christ, and our heavenly Father, and the powerful working of His Holy Spirit. The help we need is available to us in God.

Again, if we think about anxiety, we can see this, hey? Anxiety is one of the most prevalent mental health disorders in South Africa. How wonderful to know that for one of the most prevalent mental health challenges, God’s Word has good things to say!

God’s Word is full of comfort, full of promises that can, not necessarily to solve those mental health problems, (because I don’t think that’s what God’s Word is trying to do), but what God’s word is doing is speaking into our situations, giving us hope and help when we need it most, helping us understand the dynamics of anxiety, helping us the relationship between our hearts and our circumstances, and what it means to trust God in the midst of danger.

So, God’s word speaks right into our mental health challenges. Depending on the challenge, it’ll speak to those things in different ways. But because suffering people always need God’s help, whatever mental health struggle we have, God has something to offer us.

How Does A Relationship With God Help?

Let’s end with that, right? Let’s end by thinking about—okay, well, we’ve thought about what is a man, what is mental health. Now let’s end with thinking about how a relationship with God help? How does grace connect with us in that struggle?
I want to try and get quite specific and think a little bit practically with you. I’d love for this to maybe come back up in the Q&A if you have questions about this.

Here’s the principle—I’ll try to illustrate it from Psalm 8. We’ll go back to Psalm 8 in a moment. Here’s the basic principle: The personal God gets personal with us, and He speaks to us through His word. So, God comes to us, and He speaks to us through His word. We get personal with Him, and we respond to Him in prayer, right? We hear Him speaking, and we respond to Him in prayer.

As we continue to engage with Him, of course, His word continues to speak to us, and we continue to respond to his word. There is this back-and-forth, reciprocal fellowship with God—that’s at the heart of walking with God.

What does it mean to walk with God? It means, day by day, to hear His voice through His word and to respond to Him in what I describe as “honest faith.” Honest faith is: “Lord, I trust You. I hear what You’re saying, but here’s my response to what You’re saying. I’ve got these questions about it. I’ve got this struggle to believe it.”

Let’s use Psalm 8 to help us think about this, okay?

If you have a Bible, keep it open at Psalm 8. The personal God has actually spoken to us this morning through His word. What has He said? He has said that He is mindful of us. He has reminded us that He cares for us. He has taught us in verse 5 that He has crowned us with glory and honor and has made us rulers of the earth.

We’re meant to govern this earth—we’re meant to run it on His behalf, right? God, in other words, this morning has affirmed this morning that we matter to Him, that we have dignity. Although we’re weak, we’re important. I love that word in verse 4—He is mindful of you.

Just think about that for a moment. Slow down. Your heavenly Father is mindful of you.
I don’t know what kind of week you’ve had. I don’t know how work is going, how your finances are, how your family is. If they’re anything like mine, there are challenges, right?

It’s amazing to slow down and think that in this Psalm, God is telling us that He’s mindful of us, that He cares for us.
Okay, so that’s God speaking to us.
Let’s think about what honest faith looks like in response. What would you say back to God after hearing this?
I was thinking about it, and obviously, in preparation for this talk, I was thinking: What would my honest response be to Psalm 8?

I wrote it down. I wrote this:
“Lord, You tell me that I’m important and that I was made to rule the Earth, but I sometimes can’t even organize my own life. All things have not been placed under my feet. So much of my life feels like it’s beyond my control. I feel like I’m unable to govern even my little corner of the world. I feel like I’m weak and I’m failing. I don’t feel like I’m very good at being human.”

When I look at that description—crowned with glory and honor, rulers of creation—and then I think of how I’m doing, I think, ‘I don’t know… I don’t think so.’ I mean, amazingly, God says that to us, but my honest response is, ‘I don’t know.’

What does the Lord say back to me? What does He do with Psalm 8?
It’s a very interesting movement of Psalm 8 in the Bible, right? It’s picked up in the New Testament by the book of Hebrews. The author of Hebrews says that although we don’t live up to the picture of Psalm 8, there is someone who did.

In Hebrews 2:6, the author says:
“There is a place where someone has testified: ‘What is mankind that You are mindful of them, a son of man that You care for him? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.'”
This is Hebrews 2:6. So, the author of Hebrews is quoting Psalm 8, and he says:

“In putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them. Yet at present, we do not see everything subject to them.”
That’s an honest response. The author of Hebrews says, “Yeah, we don’t see that right now.”

But what do we see?
“We do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because He suffered death, so that by the grace of God He might taste death for everyone.” (Hebrews 2:9)

What is God saying back to me? He’s saying when you see Jesus, you see the perfect man—the man who lived the life I should have lived but died the death I deserve.
Because my failures aren’t just failures of weakness. My failures are actually also failures of sin. I have failed to be the man I should be. But Jesus was.

So God says, “That’s right—you are weak and guilty. You’re full of weakness and failure. But there is someone. There is a man who lived the life you should have lived, who died the death you deserve to die, who tasted death for us and is now crowned with glory and honor. He now is God’s King and Ruler.”

And because of that, we are now His brothers.
Hebrews goes on to say in verse 10:
“In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what He suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.” (Hebrews 2:10)

Here’s what I think that means:
No matter how much we struggle, no matter how much we fail, no matter how much we get wrong, no matter how ashamed we are—Jesus is not ashamed of us. He is not ashamed to call us brother.

No matter how much we’re struggling today—whether it’s with our mental health, our physical health, financially, or relationally—one day we will rule with Jesus in God’s new world. And even now, he’s helping us. Even now, he’s helping us grow, he’s helping us trust him, he’s helping us be honest with him. It’s actually an amazing thing.

He was the ultimate man, and so what do I say to that? You know, it’s my turn to respond to God again.

“Okay, thank you. Thank you for forgiveness, thank you for grace. Thank you that, although sometimes I might feel ashamed of myself, Jesus doesn’t feel ashamed of me. Thank you that he calls me brother, and thank you that you are making me holy and bringing me to glory. “
And that helps us persevere, regardless of our struggles—and not just persevere—it helps us worship.
One of the really interesting things about Psalm 8 is that this description of what it means to be human is framed— I don’t know if you noticed that—framed by expressions of worship.

“O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the Earth!” (Psalm 8:1 and 9)
Right? Our dignity, I think, is seen most clearly in our worship of God. What were we created to do? We were created to worship him. When we trust him, when we go through life persevering, trusting him, worshiping him—actually, in those spaces, regardless of how strong or weak we feel in those moments—we are being who we were created to be.

And of course, one day that will come fully and finally.
God gives us the grace we need to be honest about our struggles, and in our relationship with him, we get the strength we need to persevere—whatever we’re facing.

My prayer for us is that we would do that with him.
Let me pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for your word, for the way it speaks into our lives. We thank you for this picture of what it means to be human in Psalm 8. On the one hand, we’re amazed by the dignity of what it means to be a man, and yet, at the same time, we recognize our weakness and our frailty.

Furthermore, we recognize our own sinfulness. We recognize that we so often struggle to cope with our lives. We thank you that Jesus lived the life we should have lived but can’t, tasted death for us so that we might become his brothers.
And we thank you, Lord, that not only have you made us your brothers, but you will also get us home safely. And so, we pray that as we persevere through our struggles, trusting you, you would bring us home safely, and we would keep worshiping you.
Amen.