Part 2 of a five-part series on how a child’s faith is actually formed. The first, Your Child’s First Theology Is You, was about your face, and what your child reads in it. This one is about the face you have been reading your whole life, and the God whose face is turned toward you right now. Next up: “Good Enough Is an A.”

In the last article I made a claim that lands on most parents like a loaded barbell across the shoulders before it ever lands like grace: your child’s first picture of God is drawn from your face. Long before they can parse a doctrine, they are learning from the way you look at them whether love is something you keep or something you have to earn back.

But there is a question underneath that one, and it is probably the reason you clicked. Long before you were the face, you were the child looking up at one. You have your own first theology. You learned the character of God from a face too, and you did not get to choose whose.

So this piece is not one more thing to get right for your kid. It is about the face you needed, and whether it is still turned toward you. Received the right way, it is not another weight at all. It is the kind of good news that finally lets you set the weight down and breathe.

We are formed by the faces that meet us

Close your eyes for a second, if you are somewhere you can. Picture a face from your childhood that genuinely lit up when it saw you. Not polite. Not neutral. Glad. A grandparent, a coach, an aunt, someone whose face said, without a word, I am glad you exist.

I do not know if your grandparents were anything like mine. I have amazing grandparents and some of the most beautiful memories from time with them when I was a little boy. My grandparents were the type who reminded you not to tell your parents how much ice cream they let you eat that weekend with a wink and a smile when your parents were getting you back into their car. My maternal grandparents took my Blue Bell addiction to new levels. Honestly, looking back on it? I think they took some pride in how many gallons of vanilla ice cream a fifty-pound eight-year-old could put away in one night under their roof. Even more honesty? They barely had to twist my arm. I was a fanatic.

Regardless, they took their grandparently calling to spoil me via Blue Bell as seriously as any minister has ever taken the gospel. I could put away vanilla until my stomach stuck out like a ten-year-old with a beer belly and a fatty liver, and they would keep scooping until I was nearly sick and even more thrilled about it. My parents were trying to build a little self-discipline into me. My grandparents, with my parents’ permission, were trying to spoil me rotten, and they were very good at their jobs.

I spent summers up at their office. My grandfather owned an architectural and engineering services firm, and they kept a whole floor of their warehouse where a kid could watch TV and get underfoot. I would wander into his workroom in the middle of a workday, and this is the memory my body still keeps: no matter how busy he was, no matter what adult weight he was carrying that day, he would look up from his drafting table and the biggest smile I have ever seen on a human face would break across his. In that half a second I knew I was seen, I was wanted, I belonged. It cost him nothing. It gave me everything.

Here is what it took me years and a stack of attachment research to understand: that smile was not just sweet. It was doing something. Joy, it turns out, is relational. It is not mainly a mood you talk yourself into on your own. It is what happens when you catch the delight on someone’s face, and receive the delight they take in you, and hand some back. My grandfather looking up from that drafting table was, in the most literal sense, teaching my nervous system what joy is.

My grandmother, showing me all the ice cream bowls she had cleaned and stacked away for me before my weekend sleepover, taught my soul that I was known and would be provided for.

And my paternal grandparents, who folded my sister and me into decades of inside jokes and once took us on the great grandparent-grandkid pilgrimage to Branson, Missouri (the Vegas of grandparent-grandchild vacation destinations), wired my nervous system to know that I belonged to a people, and to a people who knew love and joy.

Maybe a face like that came to you the moment I asked. Maybe you had to reach back years to find one. And maybe no face came at all, and the reaching has its own ache, and I am not going to rush you past that or tie it off with a blessing and move on. That ache is the exact place the rest of this is trying to reach.

Because that is not a sentimental memory. That is your nervous system telling you the truth about how you were built. A caregiver’s face, their eyes, their tone, is the first thing an infant uses to answer the questions every one of us is still quietly asking in a hard room: Am I safe here? Am I seen? Do I belong? We are formed, from the very beginning, by the faces that turn toward us and the faces that turn away.

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Two faces in the oldest blessing we have

Now listen to the oldest blessing the people of God ever carried, from Numbers 6. Archaeologists found a version of it scratched onto two little silver scrolls near Jerusalem, older than the Dead Sea Scrolls by roughly five centuries. People wore these words against their skin.

The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;
the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.

Notice how much of that blessing is about a face. God’s face, twice.

Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw, in Landscapes of the Soul (Tyndale, 2025), one of the best books I have read on the science and the spirituality of attachment, make a point about those two lines that I have not been able to put down. (They also walk through this exact material on their Attaching to God podcast, in an episode titled “What If God Actually Likes You?” It is worth twenty-six minutes of your commute.) Drawing on attachment research, they argue that our deepest relational need, what they call joyful connection, comes in two movements, and that both of them are sitting right here in the blessing.

The first movement is the shining face. The LORD make his face shine on you. This is the face of delight, eyes dancing, glad to be with you. The Holsclaws call the felt version of this “emotional caffeine,” the face-to-face loop between a caregiver and a child that grows the capacity for joy itself. It is not transactional. It is not a reward for a good week. It is a face that lights up because you walked in.

The second movement is the turning face. The LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace. This is the face that finds you when you are overwhelmed, ashamed, exhausted, hiding. The Holsclaws call this “returning to joy,” the attuned face that meets you in distress and helps you come back. Attachment researchers would call it the safe haven: not the relationship you explore from, but the one you return to when it has all gone wrong.

Here is why I think this matters for anyone carrying an anxious or despairing mind. When we are overwhelmed, our nervous system drops into what the Holsclaws call protection mode, the fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown state. And in that state we are certain that every face has turned away. That is not a spiritual failure. That is a nervous system doing its job with an old and incomplete map of who is safe. And the blessing of Numbers 6 is not spoken to the version of you who has it together. It is aimed straight at the version of you in protection mode. God’s peace, the blessing says, does not come from everything being okay. It comes from a face that stays.

Which face did you learn on God?

Here is the pattern the whole series turns on. We do not learn the character of God first from sermons. We learn it from what it felt like to need someone. And then, later, we hand God that same face.

So if the face you learned on was mostly disappointed, you will hand God a disappointed face. If the face went warm when you performed and quiet when you struggled, you will assume God’s face works the same way, shining when you are doing well and turning away the moment you are not. If the face was rarely there at all, you will suspect, underneath everything you say you believe, that God is also somewhere else, busy, and that you are mostly an obligation.

This is the quiet ache the blessing is aimed at. For the reader who never had a face light up at them, the promise of Numbers 6 is not a generic “God loves you.” It is specific. It is a countenance, turned toward you, on purpose. The Holsclaws land this exactly where the mental-health-and-faith conversation needs it to land: no matter what your early life was like, joy is still available in the face of God turned toward you. And they route the peace of that turning face through Jesus specifically, tying it to Paul’s line in Philippians about the peace that Jesus came to offer, the peace that guards your heart in Christ Jesus.

And a lot of us are spending our whole lives trying to love a face that was never his. We are flinching from a God assembled out of the people who first failed us, certain there is some colder, truer face behind the kind one. The theologian T. F. Torrance said it about as bluntly as it can be said: there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ. No hidden face, no disappointed one waiting in the shadows, no God whose real disposition is different from the face that has already turned all the way toward you in him.

The face has a name, and it is Jesus

Here is what keeps this from being one more nice idea about God’s kindly presence. The God we are talking about did not stay a shining face in the safe distance of heaven. In Jesus, the face turned all the way toward us and came into the room.

The historic claim of the church is not simply that Jesus is like God. It is that God is like Jesus. So when I ask what God’s face is actually doing toward you right now, I am not guessing at a mood behind the clouds. I am looking at Jesus. And the face of Jesus does not go quiet when you fall apart. It is the face that turned toward tax collectors and lepers and the ones everyone else had learned to look past. It is the face that wept at a friend’s grave before it did anything useful about it. It is, at the very end, a face on a cross, turned toward the people driving the nails, still not looking away.

That is the turning face of Numbers 6, made flesh. The God we know in Jesus is not the disappointed parent you have been flinching from. He is the one whose defining move, over and over, is to turn his face toward the exact place you were sure he had left.

You can behold a face like that. And it turns out beholding is the whole point.

Some of the most spiritual work you will do is letting God look at you

The oldest Christian instinct about prayer is not that it starts with talking. It starts with being sought, and then with looking back. The Psalmist does not open with a request; he answers a summons about a face: You have said, Seek my face. My heart says to you, Your face, LORD, do I seek (Psalm 27:8). Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his small book simply called Prayer, described contemplation as learning to gaze on the face of God, to behold him before you have achieved anything for him. Spiritual formation, in that light, does not begin with doing more. It begins with receiving who God is toward you.

And what we behold is what we become. If the face you imagine God having is cold, evaluating, perpetually disappointed, that face will quietly form the way you carry yourself, and the way your own face meets your kids across the kitchen table. But if the face you receive is shining and turned toward you, delighting in you, steady with you when you are not steady at all, a different presence starts to form in you. You cannot give your children a face you have never received. This is the deepest reason the last piece was not one more thing to perform. You do not manufacture a warm face for your kid by trying harder. You catch it, from a God whose face is already turned toward you.

So let me hand you the same three small invitations I once handed a room full of exhausted people, adapted for wherever you are tonight.

First, the shining face. Sometime this week, before the emails, before the noise, sit still for sixty seconds and let God look at you with delight instead of with a checklist. Pray the old words as if they were spoken to you and not achieved by you: Lord, make your face shine on me. You are not performing. You are receiving.

Second, the turning face. When you hit protection mode, when the shame spins up and every face feels turned away, do not try to think your way out of it first. Take one slow breath and pray the smaller, truer prayer: Turn your face toward me. Let your nervous system borrow the steadiness of a God who is not going anywhere.

Third, the face you carry. Ask who needs your face to be a blessing this week. Not fixing them. Not correcting them. Simply being glad they exist, the way somebody was once glad you did. It costs almost nothing to turn your face toward someone. It can change the weather of their whole day.

The blessing, again

God’s blessing is not first a task list. It is a face. A shining face that delights in you before you have done anything to deserve it. A turning face that finds you when you are overwhelmed and will not look away. And in Jesus, that face has crossed the distance, taken on skin, and turned all the way toward you, even into the dark.

You have been reading faces your whole life to learn what God is like.

Let this be the one you read now.

For some of you, I know that is not a small ask. The face you learned on did not shine, or it left, or it turned on you, and being told God’s face is different can feel like being handed a promise in a language your body never learned. I am not going to paper over that with a blessing and move on. It is the next thing this series owes you, and it is where we are going: what the God we know in Jesus does with a mirror that was cracked from the start.

May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you.
May the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.

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I Want To Hear From You!

This post opens with a question, and I actually want to ask it:

Whose face lit up when you walked into the room ?
Or did you have to reach for one, and come up empty?

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Notes, credit, and a few rabbit holes

A word before you skim this part. I am a theology nerd, and I would rather over-credit the people I am building on than pretend I arrived at any of this by myself. So treat what follows as part footnote, part reading list, for anyone who wants to keep pulling the thread.

The heart of this piece, the two movements of God’s face and the reading of Numbers 6 as a double face-blessing, is not mine. It comes from Cyd and , Landscapes of the Soul (Tyndale, 2025), from their chapter “One Desire: Joyful Connection.” The terms “joyful connection,” “emotional caffeine,” “returning to joy,” and “protection mode” are theirs, and are not standard attachment vocabulary, so I want them plainly credited. If the framework moved you, go to the source. The book is genuinely good, and they teach this same Numbers 6 material on their Attaching to God podcast, in episode 137, "What If God Actually Likes You?" and they also write at Embodied Faith on Substack.

If you want to keep pulling the attachment thread, the science under all of it runs from John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth through Allan Schore’s work on affect regulation. But if you only read one, read Curt Thompson, either The Soul of Shame or Anatomy of the Soul. He is the most humane bridge I know between the neuroscience and the life of faith.

Two theologians did quiet, load-bearing work here. The line “there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ” is T. F. Torrance, a sentence he returns to across his work (I first met it in The Mediation of Christ). And the conviction that prayer begins in beholding rather than achieving is Hans Urs von Balthasar’s, from his small book Prayer, which I have read more times than anything else on the subject. On beauty as the thing that reaches us before argument does, David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, though fair warning, it is a mountain.

One last one, because I cannot help myself. The blessing at the center of this piece is old almost past believing. In 1979, archaeologists near Jerusalem found two tiny silver scrolls, the Ketef Hinnom amulets, with a version of these very words scratched into them. They date to around 600 BC, they sit today in the Israel Museum, and they are among the oldest fragments of the Bible we have, older than the Dead Sea Scrolls by roughly five centuries. People wore this blessing against their skin. I find that unreasonably moving.

This is the second article in this series. Read the first one below. Part 3, “Good Enough Is an A,” is coming next and is about the most freeing truth in all of attachment research.

Mike Skinner is the founder of Cruciform Hope Ministries, where he writes about where mental illness and the Christian faith meet. He has spent nearly two decades in pastoral ministry, currently serves as a chaplain to interdenominational high school students, and holds a Master of Arts in Theological Studies.

I have a four-year-old daughter, and most days I am still battling a little voice in the back of my head telling me I’m not doing this right. I burnt a pancake the other day, and it made my sweet girl cry. That’s the kind of thing that can undo an anxious, weary heart. I used to think it meant I was failing at being a parent and I might be doomed to also fail to give her a real and enduring faith in the crucified Lord of Life.

Every Christian parent I’ve ever met wants their kid to end up with a real faith. Not a performance, not a phase, but the kind that holds when life stops being kind.

So we do the things. Youth group. Family devotions, or the low-grade guilt of skipping family devotions for the third week running. The right school, the right music, the conversation we rehearse in the car before we ever say it out loud. We treat a child’s faith like a structure we’re building, and we lie awake wondering if we’ve used enough of the right materials.

I want to tell you something that will sound, at first, like more pressure. Then I want to show you why it’s the opposite: why it’s one of the most freeing things I know, and why it sits exactly where the best developmental research and the oldest Christian theology turn out to be saying the same thing.

The Most Predictive Factor

The sociologist Christian Smith has spent decades studying what actually forms the faith of young people, what makes it stick into adulthood, and what makes it quietly evaporate somewhere around the sophomore year of college. After all the data, the single strongest predictor isn’t the youth pastor. It isn’t the camp, the school, or the worship playlist. It’s the parents. Specifically, the faith the parents actually live. Not the one they talk about, but the one the kid watches them inhabit at the kitchen table and in the worst week of the year.

If you’ve absorbed any of the usual Christian-parenting anxiety, your stomach probably just dropped. Great. One more thing that’s on me. One more way to fail him.

Stay with me, because that reaction is precisely the lie I want to take apart. The research is true. But what it actually says, looked at closely, is not what the frightened parent assumes it says.

A Child’s First Theology Is Their Autobiography

Long before a child can parse a doctrine, they are already running a theology. They just can’t say it out loud yet.

They are learning, from the way they are held, whether the world is safe. They are learning, from what happens the day they fail or melt down or humiliate themselves, whether love is something you keep or something you have to earn back. And they are learning, from your face in their worst moment, whether the people who love you stay when it gets ugly, or whether they go somewhere else until you’re easier to be around.

This is what attachment researchers have been mapping for half a century. A child builds an internal working model of love out of those earliest relationships, and that model becomes the lens everything else gets read through. Eventually, that includes God.

A child’s first theology is their autobiography. They will imagine God to be something like whoever was there in the dark.

So when your anxious teenager finally tells you, at the end of some long and circular argument, what they actually think God thinks of them, you may hear your own posture coming back at you in their words. The God who is disappointed but trying to be patient. The God who’s warm when you’re doing well and goes a little quiet when you’re not. The God who is, mostly, an obligation. Children don’t learn the character of God from what we say about him. They learn it from what it felt like to need us.

If you stopped reading here, this would be unbearable, because no parent has been the perfect face of God. Not for one week. Not for an afternoon.

That’s where the gospel walks in. And it’s where the research, of all things, agrees with it.

The Thing That Actually Forms a Secure Child

Here is the finding almost nobody preaches.

Secure attachment, the kind that tends to produce a resilient, faith-holding adult, is not built by parents who never fail their children. It never has been. Decades of research point somewhere stranger and a great deal kinder: secure attachment is built by rupture and repair.

The rupture is when it goes wrong. You snap at the dinner table. You go cold. You’re scrolling your phone when they finally worked up the nerve to say the thing, and they watch you not look up. You misread the entire situation and handle it like someone who has never met a teenager. Every parent ruptures, constantly. It is not optional, and it is not the failure. (That part should make you exhale.)

The repair is the return. It’s coming back and saying: I got that wrong. That wasn’t about you. I’m sorry. I’m not going anywhere. It’s the reconnection after the break, and it turns out the repair is the actual mechanism. Not the absence of rupture. The presence of return. A child who lives through rupture and repair, over and over, learns the deepest lesson there is: the bond survives the breakage. Love is not fragile. You cannot use it up. They always come back.

And consider the other kind of home, not the one full of rupture but the one terrified of it. The parents who work themselves to the bone never to be seen failing. The risk there isn’t that polish injures a child in some measurable, guaranteed way. It’s that a home which never visibly breaks never gets the chance to show a child that breakage can be survived. The lesson the child can miss is the one that matters most. They learn to keep the calm intact. They learn that everyone has to hold it together or the whole thing comes apart, without ever learning the deeper thing underneath it: that love holds even when the calm doesn’t. A child raised on flawless management learns to manage. A child who lives through rupture and repair learns they are safe.

Read that again if you’re an anxious parent of an anxious kid. The thing you are most ashamed of, that you lose it, that you get it wrong, that you could list your failures by heart, is not what disqualifies you from forming your child’s faith. How you come back is the curriculum.

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Why the Cross Says the Same Thing

This is the part where I, as a theologian, have to sit down for a second, because the overlap is almost too much.

The God of the Christian gospel is not revealed most fully in unbroken success. He’s revealed most fully at the cross, in the worst rupture imaginable, the tearing of the relationship between heaven and earth. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. And what does God do there? He does not leave. He goes into the rupture and stays inside it until it is repaired from within.

This is what cruciform hope means: Divine Love healing humanity in and through its suffering. Not by avoiding the break, but by entering it and carrying us back out. The whole gospel is a rupture-and-repair story. The relationship breaks. God refuses to let the breakage be the end of it. God comes all the way down into the dark to bring us home.

So the God your child most needs to be able to imagine is not God-who-never-disappointed-you. No child has ever met that God, because no child has ever met that parent. The God your child needs is God-who-came-back. God-who-came-down. The God whose defining move is repair.

And that God you can actually show them. Not by being flawless. You can’t be, and the trying will only teach your kid that love is brittle. You show them by coming back. By walking into your teenager’s room the morning after you handled it badly. They’ve got one earbud in, they won’t look at you, the cereal bowl from last night is still on the desk. And you say the truest sentence a parent ever says: I was wrong last night. I’m sorry. I’m not going anywhere.

That is not a parenting hack. That is a thirty-second sermon on the character of God, and your kid will absorb it into their bones in a way no curriculum will ever reach. You are not failing to show them God when you rupture and repair. You are showing them the actual one.

Lament Is Part of the Curriculum

There’s one more piece, and it’s the one that finally takes the weight off.

A lot of Christian parents believe that to form their child’s faith they have to model a faith that’s working: peaceful, certain, victorious. So when their own faith is struggling, when they’re anxious or grieving or barely hanging on, they hide it. They perform a steadiness they don’t have, because they’ve decided the performance is what the kid needs to see.

It’s the reverse. A child who only ever sees performed faith learns that real faith isn’t allowed to struggle, and the first time their faith struggles, they’ll assume they’ve lost it, and they’ll hide it, exactly the way they once watched you hide yours.

But a child who watches a parent lament, who sees you bring your real fear and grief and unanswered prayer honestly to God and stay there, learns the most durable faith there is. They learn faith is not the absence of struggle. They learn you can be fragile and faithful in the same breath. They learn the God you both believe in has room for the whole truth of a person, and not just the filtered version.

Scripture is completely unembarrassed about this. A huge share of the Psalms are flat-out complaints to God, and he kept every one of them, parked them right in the middle of the prayer book, and called them Scripture forever. He was teaching his children how to pray the dark parts. You can teach yours the same way, and the lesson lands deepest not when you explain it but when they catch you in the middle of doing it.

You don’t have to model a God who has it all together. You get to model a God who stays in the dark and doesn’t rush you out of it. That’s a God an anxious kid can actually trust.

So Here Is the Whole Thing

Your child’s first theology is you.

That’s true, and it isn’t pressure.

It’s an invitation, and it’s shaped like a cross.

You will not form their faith by becoming the perfect face of God. You’ll form it by being a real, fragile, frequently-failing parent who keeps coming back, because that is not a worse picture of God than perfection. It’s a truer one. The gospel was never that God never let you down. The gospel is that God came down.

So when you fail your anxious kid tonight, maybe over something as small as a burnt pancake, maybe over something much bigger (and you will, because you’re a human being and they’re hard to parent and it’s late and you’re out of patience), don’t spiral into the lie that you’ve damaged them, that you’ve ruined the whole project, that one more rupture is proof you were never enough.

Go back. Close the distance you opened, get down to their level, and say the truest thing you know: I got that wrong. I love you. I’m not going anywhere.

You will have just preached the gospel. And they will have just received it. Not as a doctrine, but as the shape of the only love they’ve ever known.

That’s the work. Not flawless. Faithful.

Let Me Know What You Think!

Your comments, questions, and ideas bring me so much joy! Please don’t hesitate to join in the conversation below by posting a message.

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Notes and Further Reading

The research on parents as the single most predictive factor in adolescent faith is sociologist Christian Smith’s, especially Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, 2005) and the follow-up Souls in Transition (Oxford, 2009). The argument has been sharpened in Handing Down the Faith (Oxford, 2021), co-authored with Amy Adamczyk.

The attachment-theory thread runs from John Bowlby’s original trilogy and Mary Ainsworth’s strange-situation studies through Allan Schore’s neurobiological work on affect regulation. The most accessible Christian bridge is Curt Thompson’s Anatomy of the Soul (Tyndale, 2010) and The Soul of Shame (IVP, 2015), both of which trace the line from interpersonal neurobiology to the inner life shaped by the gospel of Jesus. Daniel Siegel’s The Developing Mind and Parenting from the Inside Out sit underneath both.

The rupture-and-repair mechanism specifically traces back to Edward Tronick’s still-face experiments and has been carried forward most clearly in the clinical work of Karlen Lyons-Ruth and the developmental writing of Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson.

This article will be the first in a twice weekly series on the complex intersection on parenting, cruciform hope, mental health, attachment theory, and spiritual formation. A future work will explore in detail the concept worked out in depth by Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw in their beautiful work Landscapes of the Soul (Tyndale), which maps the same attachment territory onto two movements of God’s face in the Aaronic blessing (Numbers 6:24-26): a joy-amplifying face and a returning-to-joy face. Their “returning to joy” names close to the same mechanism as rupture-and-repair above, just from the amplify/repair side rather than the break/repair side.

On the theology of the cross as the place where Divine Love enters human suffering and heals from inside it, a fuller theological account is in the works. Look for Cruciform Hope: A Theological Account, a scholarly companion to this and future essays here, at cruciformhope.org later this year. Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God (SCM, 1974) is the touchstone for the broader claim.

Mike Skinner is the founder of Cruciform Hope Ministries, where he writes about where mental illness and the Christian faith meet. He has spent nearly two decades in pastoral ministry, currently serves as a chaplain to interdenominational high school students, and holds a Master of Arts in Theological Studies.

I’ll start with what I would have loved to hear on the way home from that psychiatrist’s office:

When Jesus opens the Sermon on the Mount, he does it by listing eight categories of people he says are blessed. They were not the people his original audience would have guessed were blessed. The poor in spirit. Those who mourn. The meek. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The merciful. The pure in heart. The peacemakers. The persecuted. We have a name for the list. We call them the Beatitudes.

We almost always read them wrong.

We read them as commands. As if Jesus is saying, here are the eight kinds of people I want you to be, so go become them. Spend more time sobbing about all the loss and grief there is around you. Find yourself so oppressed that your body cries out for justice the way a starving man’s body cries out for bread and water. Be the best at being humble. As if the kingdom of heaven is the prize at the end of an obstacle course made out of performative postures we have to learn to fake in order to impress God.

This isn’t the way the language works in the original Greek, however, and it simply isn’t what Jesus is doing here. The Beatitudes are not assignments. They are announcements. They are Gospel. Good news. Jesus is echoing Isaiah 61 by declaring how God’s inbreaking reign, happening through his very life and ministry, is indescribably good news to a very specific group of people. He is pronouncing grace over people who are already weary and anxious.

Jesus isn’t laying heavy burdens on top of already heavy-burdened people so that they know how to experience God and receive his love. He is pronouncing a verdict over the people who are beaten and battered by letting everyone know that a new variable has entered into the equation the world uses to calculate who is “in luck” and who is “out of luck.” The new variable has a name: Jesus, the Father’s eternal Son, announcing and enacting the long-awaited kingdom in the power of the Spirit. The math has seriously changed.

The mourners are blessed because Jesus is at work and a world of darkness will be receiving long overdue divine comfort. The meek are blessed because the God who took on flesh in Jesus, and who lives in his church through the Spirit, is in the business of giving the earth back to the people the strong have walked over. The kingdom does not arrive at the end of a self-improvement program. It arrives as a gift, Lamb-stained and cross-shaped, for those who are at the very end of their rope.

This matters for everyone reading this, but it matters in a particular way for the nearly one in four American adults living with mental illness, and for the nearly half of American adolescents who do. Almost half of us, sometime in our lives, will be given a name for something uninvited or unexpected that is happening inside our brains and minds and bodies. The Beatitudes were spoken for the people who needed to hear them the most. For the ones, like me, who may have a list of fifteen worst-case scenarios memorized for any given Tuesday.

It’s hard for you to know how important this is to me without some more vulnerability. I was sixteen when I brought that panic disorder diagnosis home. They weren’t the occasional panic attacks, either. They were the recurring, crippling kind. I learned a new word: agoraphobia. I understood it to mean that an invisible but impenetrable wall had been built around the perimeter of my childhood home. I could not walk outside without my brain and body initiating an “all-systems-go” panic attack. The rest of the world had become entirely too dangerous to my very delicate nervous system.

After the panic attacks came the major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder diagnoses, both of which have stayed with me in a more impactful way for much longer than the acute anxiety episodes. I have what doctors call “refractory depression,” or, more plainly, treatment-resistant depression, which means I have tried almost every medication and almost every therapy and found only little to moderate relief in any one of them. There is still real work being done looking for evidence-based treatments for this type of depression. The science on most of them is still very young, but I am a follower of Jesus, so I live in hope.

I tell you all that because the church I led for many years needed to hear it from me before anyone else would say it out loud. I’ve noticed that the more honestly I talk about mental health from a stage, or even just online, the more other people feel like they can talk about it as well. And I tell it now because I want you to know that the rest of this essay is not theory. I do not write about mental illness the way someone might write about a country they have read about but never visited. I know the best Mexican food restaurants, the coolest views, the worst freeways, and the cities to avoid. This is a map for receiving the blessings of Jesus in the country of mental illness, written by someone who lives there.

So let me give you a quick tour of three places I have learned to trust.

The first is the overlook, where I can see a truth so large that my words start to feel too small for it: blessed are the mentally ill because in Jesus we are loved before we are diagnosed.

Our diagnoses are real. They are not imaginary, and they are not irrelevant. But they can become a little fenced-in plot of land we mistake for the whole world. We can force ourselves to live there, or be forced to live there, until the diagnosis becomes not only something true about us but the truest thing about us.

The gospel lifts our eyes.

In the incarnation, the eternal Son of God joined himself to human nature, all of it, not just the parts we know how to admire. At the cross, he descended still further. Together, they announce that we are loved further down than any diagnosis could ever go. What is most true of us is not what shows up in MyChart, and it is not exhausted by what can be named in the DSM-5. What is most true of us is the love of the Triune God for his image-bearers, the love revealed at the cross of his Son, the love poured out by his Spirit.

Hold the diagnosis. Hold the deeper claim. Refuse to let either one swallow the other.

The second place is the shelter. Where the overlook teaches us that we are loved before we are diagnosed, the shelter teaches us that we were never meant to carry our burdens alone. Blessed are the mentally ill because the kingdom of Jesus creates a people among whom they no longer have to hide.

This means the church has to become the kind of place where this announcement is visibly true. A place where people can be honest without being reduced to what they confess. A place where theology does not rush past suffering. A place where prayer and therapy are not treated as enemies. A place where people whose suffering is not neat, tidy, or useful for a conversion video can believe that the kingdom of heaven is for them, not as a sentiment, but as a place.

There is a lot of repair to do here. The church has too often been one of the places where people learned to hide their mental illness rather than name it. That is on us. The work of becoming a community where the Beatitudes are visibly true for the anxious and weary is the actual ministry, not a side project. Concrete ministries carry good news in unmistakable language. What if a church covered the cost of someone’s therapy the same way it covers the cost of their funeral? The church could actually become good news people can touch.

The third place is the road, where if you look far enough ahead, you can find more than enough hope for the day. Blessed are the mentally ill because they belong to a future of healing and resurrection.

Not every road in this country gets easier quickly. Some of them remain steep for longer than anyone wants to admit. But Christian hope is not a white-knuckled denial of the road beneath our feet. It is a grounded kind of hope. Some days, hope is not a sunrise. It is a mile marker. It does not make the road flat, but it tells you the road is not endless.

The Holy Spirit is still at work in our exhausted bodies, our misfiring brain circuitry, our half-spoken prayers, and our long attempts at therapy and rest and friendship. Hope does not promise that the diagnosis will lift this year. Hope promises that the One who made these bodies and took on a body himself is making all things new, and that the making-new includes the parts of us that misfire, the parts of us that go silent, and the parts of us that no longer know how to be still.

I want to close where Jesus closes, not with an imperative or a neat application but with an announcement that opens a door rather than a command that closes one.

Blessed are the mentally ill,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who lay out their medications each morning and each evening,
for they shall wake to bodies the risen Christ has made new.

Blessed are those whose shopping ends in the dairy aisle,
for they shall be seated at the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Blessed are those whose minds rehearse every possible sorrow,
for they shall inherit a world where fear has no work left to do.

Blessed are those who live with bipolar disorder,
for the God we know in Jesus assumed what they feel in order to heal it.

Blessed are those whose bodies remember what their minds cannot speak,
for the One who bore wounds in his own body will raise theirs.

Blessed are those who suffer alone in rooms no one has entered,
for the One forsaken on a cross will draw near.

Blessed are those who have hidden their diagnosis in the house of God,
for they shall be called by name in the family of God.

Blessed are those overcome with a desire to take their own life,
for they shall be overcome by the loving desire of the One who gave his life for theirs.

Blessed are the mentally ill,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Notes and Further Reading

The reading of the Beatitudes as announcements rather than assignments is most clearly defended in Jonathan T. Pennington’s The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing (Baker Academic, 2017). Pennington’s argument from the Greek and from the wisdom tradition has reshaped how a generation of pastors reads Matthew 5.

The canonical Christian memoir on mental illness from inside theological vocation is Kathryn Greene-McCreight’s Darkness Is My Only Companion: A Christian Response to Mental Illness (Brazos, second edition 2015). If anything in this essay rang true, that book will sit close.

Sarah Griffith Lund’s Blessed Are the Crazy: Breaking the Silence About Mental Illness, Family, and Church (Chalice Press, 2014) comes at the same territory from a different angle. Lund is a pastor who grew up loving family members with severe mental illness, including her father, brother, and cousin. Her book is memoir and churchwide call in one: it includes a study guide and practical steps for developing a mental health ministry in your congregation. If Greene-McCreight is the theologian writing from inside her own diagnosis, Lund is the pastor writing from inside the family.

Diane Langberg’s Suffering and the Heart of God (New Growth Press, 2015) is the steadiest pastoral theology I know for the church that wants to be a real home for the anxious and weary, not just a sympathetic visitor.

On the theology of holy ignorance and refusing to over-explain suffering, Chris Green’s Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think About the Divine Matters (Cascade, 2018) is the right deep-end book. This is the profound yet accessible book that I would hand a friend who has just been told something about God and their suffering that made them doubt God’s character or their own faith.

If you arrived at this piece carrying something heavier than words: the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text, any hour of the day or night.
You are not alone in the country of mental illness.

Mike Skinner is the founder of Cruciform Hope Ministries, where he writes about where mental illness and the Christian faith meet. He has spent nearly two decades in pastoral ministry, currently serves as a chaplain to interdenominational high school students, and holds a Master of Arts in Theological Studies.

If you have ever loved someone who was sinking (into depression, anxiety, or thoughts too dark to say out loud), you know the helplessness those four friends pushed straight through.

It took me too many years in full-time ministry to learn that you cannot fix people. The most faithful thing you can do for someone who is hurting is not to fix them, and not to stand there helpless. It is to carry them to Jesus.

It is one of the stranger narratives in Mark’s gospel and I think it’s one of the most quietly radical stories as well. Jesus is early in his ministry, in a house in Capernaum, and word of his healing power has spread. Mark tells us that when Jesus saw the hole in the roof and the man on the mat, he saw their faith. Not the paralyzed man’s faith. The faith of the four friends who would not be stopped by a crowd or a roof.

With almost two decades of pastoral ministry behind me, and my own history with anxiety and depression, I have gotten weirdly familiar with what it looks like when someone gets carried well, and what it looks like when the people who love them reach for the wrong thing.

What strikes me about the four friends is the silence around them. Mark records no sermon, no advice, no diagnosis of too little faith or too much sin. He keeps only the posture: they picked up the mat and started walking, and when they hit a wall (literally), they went over it. The mat is the ministry.

The four friends had a faith that Theodore Jennings describes as “a holy impatience: this all-out, go-for-broke determination that the lame be made to walk.”

The determination is that the lame be made to walk. Not that you, personally, fix the lameness. The friends carry the mat; they do not heal the paralysis. That belongs to the God-man, the one we know as the crucified and risen Jesus. Their job is carrying.

This is what I watch people get wrong most often, and I say this with sympathy, because it is almost always love that leads them astray. When someone we love is suffering, we want to fix it. The impulse is right. What we reach for is often wrong, because we have not yet learned the difference between carrying the mat and healing the paralysis.

The fixing is not your job. The carrying is.

If you have ever struggled with mental illness, you might know what it feels like to be paralyzed in that particular way. Not literally. But the movement you know you need to make is somehow unavailable to you. The person who knows they need to get out of bed cannot make themselves get out of bed. The person who knows help is there cannot reach for it.

We do not know much about the man on the mat. We do not know if he had any faith of his own, or whether this trip was even his idea. Maybe his friends were the ones who still believed something was possible. It did not matter. Their faith did the work. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the fourth century, believed a lesson was living inside this passage: that some have been helped because others believed. I have lived inside that. There have been seasons when I could not pray the way I needed to, and it was alright for a while, because people were praying for me. Seasons when I could not hold out hope, but the people around me could see what I could not see, and claim what I could not claim, and speak truth into my life when I could not recognize it myself.

Sometimes the people we love cannot hold hope for themselves right now. This is not failure. This is what it means to be laid out. One of the most underestimated things about the church is that our faith can hold theirs for a while. We can believe for them, and pray for them, and carry what they cannot carry alone.

Jesus met the man at the bottom of that hole. He meets people now the same way. Not after they have gathered enough faith to perform their way to him, but where they are, carried in by someone who would not stop walking.

This is a particularly sobering lesson for Christians walking with someone who is struggling with a mental illness. When someone is depressed, anxious, or suicidal, the church meal train is less likely to get organized. Partly because it is harder to know what to do. Partly because the suffering is invisible. Partly because no one taught us.

The four friends did not have a theology degree. They had a mat and a roof and the conviction that their friend needed to get to the one who heals. You do not need to understand everything the person in front of you is going through. You need to be willing to carry the mat.

What that looks like in practice, what to actually say and what to avoid, is both simple and profound. I wrote a short, free guide called You Don’t Have to Fix It about exactly this. It is for the pastors, parents, and friends who are caring for someone in crisis and wondering what to do next. What not to say. What actually helps. Why staying matters more than solving.

Subscribe to Cruciform Hope below and it lands in your inbox. If you are already subscribed, you can download it directly here: cruciformhope.org/the-guide. It is short, it is free, and it is meant to be passed to anyone who might need it.

Mike Skinner is the founder of Cruciform Hope Ministries, where he writes about where mental illness and the Christian faith meet. He has spent nearly two decades in pastoral ministry, currently serves as a chaplain to interdenominational high school students, and holds a Master of Arts in Theological Studies.

Blessed are you, even now. Not when you finally rest. Now.

Blessed are you when the prayer won’t come, when the words run out, when all you can manage is to sit in the quiet and ache. The Father who made you does not require eloquence. The Spirit who prays inside you is near to the inarticulate, and has always been fluent in groaning.

Blessed are you when faith feels less like flying and more like holding your breath underwater. The holding on counts. It counts more than you know.

May you remember today that you are not your worst fears.

You are not your heaviest morning.

You are not the version of yourself you’re ashamed of at 3am.

You are held. Fragile, and held. By a Love that, in Jesus, did not stay at a safe distance from suffering but climbed all the way down into it, and has no intention of leaving.

So rest if you can. Cry if you need to. Get up if you’re able, and if you’re not, lie still and be loved anyway.

You don’t have to earn the next breath. It’s already yours.

Healing is holy. Keep going.

Mike Skinner is the founder of Cruciform Hope Ministries and currently serves as a chaplain for interdenominational high school students. He has over fifteen years in pastoral ministry and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies.

I’m a pastor-theologian who spent twelve years as the lead pastor of a small, local congregation in the Houston area and now serves as a chaplain for high school students. I’ve spent over fifteen years in ministry, I have a couple of degrees in theology, and I spend my days sitting with teenagers and parents and ministry and school leaders in some of the hardest moments of their lives.

I also know what it’s like to be the one in the hard moment. I had crushing anxiety as a teenager. I’ve walked with what doctors call “treatment-resistant depression” for most of my adult life. I love Jesus with everything I have, and I have also laid awake at 2am wondering where he is and what he is up to with me.

That’s what this is.
A place where those two things are allowed to sit next to each other.

Cruciform Hope is honest writing about faith and mental health. It’s for the person who hasn’t stopped praying but is barely holding it together. It’s for the parent watching their kid struggle and quietly blaming themselves. It’s for the pastor who cares for everyone and is cared for by no one. It’s for the Christian who is tired of being told to just trust God a little harder.

Here’s what I’ll try never to do: hand you a platitude. Tell you your pain is a faith problem. Rush you toward a resolution you’re not in yet.

Here’s what I’ll try to do instead: tell you the truth, take both your faith and your suffering seriously at the same time, and point you toward the God we know in Jesus, who came far closer to your pain than anyone ever told you.

Deep reflections. Honest hope.

That’s the whole promise.
I ground my reflections on mental health in a robust cruciform theology, and I also love learning about the latest neuroscience and psychological truths about mental health and mental illness. I like to go deep. And I can’t live without hope.

If that sounds like something you need, subscribe. It’s free, and there’s a lot more coming. I’m really glad you’re here.

Mike Skinner is the founder of Cruciform Hope Ministries and currently serves as a chaplain for interdenominational high school students. He has over fifteen years in pastoral ministry and a Master of Arts in Theological Studies.