Learning to Love the “Enemy” Within: The Church and Mental Health

“Flawed! Failure! Loser! Broken!” While our culture embraces these labels with impunity, those of us who try to follow the Way of Jesus do life differently. We believe that if we criticize what God has made, we criticize God. Accordingly followers of Jesus set the relational bar high, apart from one exception: We have become far too comfortable with denigrating and devaluing ourselves.

In this series, as part of our emphasis on the Church and mental health, we will examine our struggle with Jesus’ teaching to love ourselves. Our goal will be to learn to love the “enemy” within—those parts of us that we’d like to repress and deny—in order that we might come to the fullness of life for which we are created.