Recommended Reading: When Despair Meets Delight

Tony Robert’s book When Despair Meets Delight launched today. What a gift to the world of church ministry and mental health. Here’s an excerpt from Tony’s interview about the book that I heard…

Q: With your book and the big picture, what are some of the things the book accomplishes among its readers?

“Most of all…it would give churches and pastors inspiration and a desire to personally address the needs of those personally impacted with mental illness (those diagnosed and those with loved ones).

There’s a dangerous divide between those impacted by mental illness and the faith community. They don’t know quite what to do with each other.

There’s a lot of distrust, some of it on the psychiatric side based on fraud’s anti-religion. On the church side it may stem all the way back from interpretations of the bible ie. “demon possession,” “has no place in the community of faith.” So there needs to be a coming together for the sake of everyone.

These are the people who are often considered the least of these. And our Christian calling is to be like Jesus and reach out.

When you see stories, even if you accept there is a spiritual component — spiritual evil wickedness — involved in a condition of mental illness, and I want to stress it’s not the result of a commission of sin but it does reveal that we have a flawed nature.

We are broken in our spirit. But even if you do accept there’s demonic activity, what did Jesus do? He would go to these folks and went out of his way to go to Legion and release him from this bondage. So that’s my primary goal, and I see it both in our country and around the world, in Africa, in other ways.”

He articulates this point that I’ve never really conceptualized to this degree or been able to articulate, but I am wholeheartedly agreeing with him. We need to reconcile the faith community with the broken world, inside and out of the church.

For a personally signed copy of Tony’s paperback book, go to whendespairmeetsdelight.com.

To get your ebook copy of Tony’s book, check out his Amazon page.