A New Life: Part 1

Hi, for The Salvation Army, this is Lori Miller.

And I'm Bernie Dake. Thanks for joining us and welcome to Wonderful Words of Life. How great your love is, how great your love is. How great your love, you sing over us. Your sweet song of holy life. How great your love, you sing over us.

Your sweet song of holy life. Welcome back everybody and Lori, congratulations, you've just finished recording your 10th episode. How do you feel? Yes, I feel phenomenal and I feel actually really grateful to be able to share this sort of, especially this topic.

We are glad that you are here. You know, we're in our last two weeks of our series on mental health and this series began on September 15th. So, if you've missed any episodes, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast or visit salvationarmysoundcast.org. I love that through this whole series, Aliada doesn't just discuss mental health in a clinical way, but she sprinkles Scripture on every topic. Absolutely, because I think we sort of make the mistake of compartmentalizing mental health and spirituality when, in effect, they are one and the same. And I think it's so important that we recognize God's ability to restore in the midst of brokenness.

Yeah. Lori, it really is a privilege to have you here because you are a very deep individual. I love your writing when you share some of that vulnerability with us and I love the fact that you keep that kind of in front of us so that faith can play a role in mental health healing.

Right. There's a thing that our production staff gave us that's important for us to understand that the church should be a part of coming alongside people, living out our faith, and being a part of mental health wellness. So here's something that I need to read for you, and for faith community leaders in particular, NAMI Faith Net is a network of NAMI members and friends dedicated to promoting caring faith communities and promoting the role of faith in recovery for individuals and families affected by mental illness. Visit NAMI Faith Net for more information on how you can promote the role of faith in recovery. I think we need to be responsible and careful not to spiritualize every aspect of mental health because sometimes I think we do that. So there's great value in therapy and there's great value in science in regard to mental health because much of it is a chemical thing.

So we don't want to trivialize that at all. I think we just want to recognize the power of faith hand in hand, sort of together with the other aspects of healing. And so I think that's really important to say. I don't want to overplay this idea. I mentioned it a couple episodes back where I just said be present. Right.

Put down the phone, the social media, but just take a break and be present with other people or just become aware of yourself and take a minute to breathe. In fact, in the word we read simply to be still. That's right. To know that he is God. And that, of course, for us as Bible-believing Christians is important to say out loud and to understand personally.

Yeah. We have to dwell, we have to abide, we have to stay. And when we do that, and even secular studies have shown that faith helps people to live with mental illness. Amen. If this series has been a blessing to you, we'd love to hear from you. Share your testimony with us or let us know how we can pray for you. Send us an email at radioatuss.salvationarmy.org or call 1-800-229-9965. If you're just joining us this week, I pray that you'll go back and listen to the previous episodes because we have an incredible godly woman in our studio for this series.

Her name is Aliana Dawkins, and she works for the Salvation Army in Washington, D.C., here in the United States, which is our nation's capital. And she comes with a lot of experience and passion related to mental health, and over our series we've talked about so many different things. This week we want to kind of talk about the idea of new life. The Bible in 2 Corinthians talks about being a new creation. We are a new creation. When we ask God to forgive us our sins or when we accept Jesus into our heart as our savior, in an idea we are a new creation. We're a fresh start.

Nothing in your past needs to be brought forward into the future unless it's experience that will make you stronger or help you make better decisions. Aliana, as it relates to that, how would you encourage our listeners in this regard, mental health and new life? New life.

I think you just segue us right into it. Speaking about the Bible and the new creation, as I said earlier in the show is that there are 365 references regarding anxiety and not fearing in the Bible. I do not think that is by coincidence. If you look up just the word anxiety in the scriptures that are related to it, there's 53 of those.

So now we got one for every day and at least one for every week. I truly believe that God knew that in this life we would experience ups and downs, as did his mouthpieces in the Bible. They had great victory and then you had some not so great victories.

You had some seasons of dryness and drought. I think finding this information is interesting because at some point in time in our life we'll all feel that we don't measure up. That we don't measure up to what our preconceived expectations were of ourselves and the trajectory of our life. But that God gives us opportunities through just these instances when we look up the word anxiety in the Bible to know that he's already laid out a foundation of encouragement and support. And that when we're thinking and talking about mental illness, it is beyond an occasional sadness, as we talked about with depression.

There's a difference. But you can have sadness that's brought on by life events and those two should not be mixed up. But when there is a consistency in your ability to feel sadness, then that's when we should reach out for help. That's when we should allow God, who's graced all these various doctors and clinicians with the gift of support, to allow them to operate in their giftings with those things. We've made mental health and mental illness so complicated, as I talked about earlier, with such the negative stigmas attached to them.

But why should we be ashamed? If somebody has heart disease or they're diabetic, they adjust. You know, they go see a doctor. But if there's something chemically wrong with our brain or our emotions or feelings, we don't so much. When there's sympathy and encouragement, we share our personal stories of overcoming. And that's what a new life is, is that sometimes we don't believe that the instances, I believe that the instances in our life are not just for ourselves. They're for us to share our testimony of overcoming, of that I went through that, but it didn't kill me. It made me stronger and things like that. So I really want us to be able to know in this instance that you can deal with mental illness.

Mental illness is not you, it's a part of you, just like anything else. Those are good words. I love when you bring Scripture into how we address mental health. I think that the Word of God is true. I believe it to be true.

And the Salvation Army, as an organization, believes that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament were given by the inspiration of God, and that they only constitute, they only constitute the divine rules of Christian faith and practice. And as Christian people, when it comes to these, like you mentioned stigma, which goes back to a previous episode, when it comes to those stigmas, perception is not reality. For people that are struggling with the way they feel, someone sees them, I believe that's just the devil lying to them, trying to play tricks on them emotionally.

Your reality is that you are a child of God, a new creation, which we talked about last week. And for us as Christian people, we need to rely on God. And 365 instances or more of Him saying, fear not.

And then 53 instances of Him saying, you know, all your anxiety, be anxious for nothing. So God is not a God of chance. God has got you right in the palm of His hand. And if we go all the way to Jeremiah in the Old Testament, 29, 11, a lot of you know this verse, but God knows the plans He has for you. He declares that, plans for hope and a future, plans to prosper you, not to harm you. So hide these words in your heart, hide God's word in your heart, and know that He will never leave you or forsake you. These aren't our words. I'd love to take credit for some of the beautiful scriptures that we read, but God put them there for a reason. He inspired people to write them based on the experiences that they had with Him or with His Son here on earth. And I think for God to come inhabit our praise is important and for people to see Him in us.

Absolutely. So, Alia, I'm so glad that you're here because you bring wisdom and experience to our show and make us better. We hope that you're having a good time.

We've got one more episode with her, and we pray that maybe we even get to hear you sing before the end of this series, but I haven't teased you about it, but it's a church girl, and I don't know if you can hear her South Carolinian accent sneaking in every so often, but we are so glad that you're here. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for joining us.

God bless you for coming out and listening to the show. We hope that you are blessed, and if you are, then to God alone be the glory, and God bless you. The Salvation Army's mission, Doing the Most Good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support, and we would love to hear from you. Email us at radio at uss.salvationarmy.org. Call 1-800-229-9965 or write us at P.O.

Box 29972, Atlanta, Georgia, 30359. When you contact us, we'll send you our gift for this series. It's totally free for listeners like you, one per household, while supplies last. You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes or your favorite podcast store and be sure to give us a rating. Just search for Wonderful Words of Life. Follow us on social media for the latest episodes, extended interviews, and more. And if you don't have a church home, we invite you to visit your local Salvation Army worship center. They'll be glad to see you. This is Bernie Dake inviting you to join us next time for the Salvation Army's Wonderful Words of Life.