New book offers God’s comfort to mental-health sufferers
BURNABY, BC—Author and photographer Marja Bergen has written a new book that she believes is unique in offering comfort and hope to people—and especially Christians—struggling with mood disorders and other mental-health challenges.
“You can give them flowers, and that’s great. You can give them a card. But what kinds of cards have been written for this specific purpose? There aren’t any. You can give them a note card, but what do you write on it? You get stuck,” says Bergen.
“I don’t think there’s anything else like this book on the market right now.”
Reflections for Our Highs and Lows contains 28 Scripture-based devotionals culled from those that Bergen has been writing and e-mailing weekly to almost 300 people since early 2013.
Bergen, who illustrated the book with her own nature photographs, has herself battled bipolar disorder for close to 50 years. But she also believes people don’t necessarily have to be diagnosed with depression to benefit from it.
“People suffer losses. They have a hard time just because of the bad weather. It could be anything,” she says. “And I’m hoping that this little book will be a good gift for a friend to give to them at a time like that, to show that they really care.”
Don Dyck, the lead pastor of Brentwood Park Alliance Church, where Bergen has been a member for over 10 years, hopes people will buy the book even just for themselves.
“We all go through highs and lows,” he says. “We all need words of comfort and encouragement in the middle of our lows, and I think this book will also help us celebrate the joy that we experience in our highs.”
Reflections is Bergen’s third book. Her first two were Riding the Roller Coaster (1999) and A Firm Place To Stand (2008). She calls those her “fighting books.”
“I was fighting stigma,” she says. “But with this book, I’ve stopped fighting, and I just look at what God has to offer. I’m 68. What a good time of life to be sharing my reflections on what life is all about, what God says to me. It’s perfect.”
In 2006, Bergen founded the Living Room, a faith-based support group for people with mood disorders that began meeting at her church. As word of her ministry quickly spread, it became a model for other groups in churches across Canada and even in other parts of the world. Bergen ended up writing curricula for these groups.
Dyck says Bergen has helped his congregation “come to understand in ways that would not have been possible what it means to live with a mood disorder.”
“The reality is that within a church, there’s often stigma because there’s a tendency to see mental-health issues as spiritual issues,” he says. “I don’t think that was necessarily the case here, but at least she opened up our understanding to say, ‘This is what it’s like.’”
In August, Bergen took the painful step of turning Global Living Room, as it’s now called, over to Vancouver-based Sanctuary Mental Health Ministries.
“I felt I was letting God down,” Bergen says. “I’m not one to give up on things, but I didn’t feel I was doing as good a job on it as I should. It needed somebody with a stronger organization to run it.”
Sanctuary’s mandate is to help churchgoers support mental-health recovery within their faith communities.
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