The Mat is the Ministry
What four friends and a torn-open roof teach us about loving someone through a mental health crisis.
Four men carried their paralyzed friend across town on a mat. When they reached the house where Jesus was teaching, the crowd was packed too tight to get through. So they climbed onto the roof, tore a hole in it, and lowered him down, right in front of Jesus. They could not heal their friend. So they carried him to the one who could.
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.