Mental Health

How are you? No, really: How are you?

It’s a rainy Sunday morning and the guy on stage is giving his usual welcome-to-church spiel and, like he does every week, he refuses to let us sit down. Before we all get comfortable in our...

Health

Faith and fitspo: When are we merely worshipping golden calves?

Fitness, once culturally confined to small communities of professional strength sports, bodybuilding, track and field, is now accessible to the white-collar worker, housewife and kid next door....

Real Life, Real People

I was 18, full of ambition, full of myself. Then my heart stopped beating

I woke up groggy and disoriented in a bed that was not my own. I looked around and realised I was in a humid hospital ward. Beside me, an old man was wheezing violently, hands gripping onto the...

Mental Health

Do you cry yourself to sleep each night like I do?

If you didn’t know me well, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that I have been struggling with depression, anxiety and a combination of anorexia and bulimia for most of my life....

Discipleship

Don’t numb the pain

Sigmund Freud once proposed that the mind seeks to avoid pain and find pleasure. In this life, we will get our hearts get broken. People might say mean things to us. Something or someone beloved...

Mental Health

It is okay to be not okay

Have you ever felt a pain so great that it pounds through every fibre of your being? I have. My mind goes back to one night some years back when I’d gone to see a volunteer counsellor in one of the...

Mental Health

Why are you crying?

Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot....

Real Life, Real People

The boy who’s always been picked on – and the God who picked me

I’ve always been bullied. Growing up, I felt no one understood me. I always felt that my parents favoured other people. At least, to my young mind it looked that way – it seemed they always...

Movies & TV

The longest day in the world

Death. You know this feeling according to what you’ve been through. The death of a person. The death of a dream. The death of hope. I admit I probably haven’t experienced great tragedy...