It’s OK to Be OK

Imagine this scenario. You visit a church small group for the first time, and prayer request time starts up. You’re new to the community and visiting churches. You like this one so far, so you decide to visit a small group to get a better idea of how they do things. As prayer requests start up, you realize they all sound the same. Pray for Aunt Betty’s upcoming surgery and Tom who has COVID, but no one seems willing to open up about any personal struggles. You sense hesitancy among the group members—almost like everyone has erected a wall of self-protection. You, however, have experienced a difficult week. The new move has been hard, your kids haven’t made any friends yet, and you’ve not found a church home. You could really use some prayer. But this group doesn’t seem hospitable to you asking for help. Is it OK to not be OK?

Imagine one more scenario. You’re a member in a church small group, and the leader has asked for prayer requests. You immediately sense that familiar pang of awkward panic before realizing that the rotation is going the other way. You’ve got time. As you contemplate some requests to share, you realize that the members of your group are getting personal. They’re sharing some hard struggles. One person is sharing about a recent bout with depression. Another person’s spouse just cheated on them. Your planned requests no longer seem sufficient. You’ve got to come up with something more difficult or risk sounding inauthentic. But you can’t. Things in your life are actually going pretty well. Is it OK to say so? Is it OK to be OK?

I believe it’s possible to work so hard at trying to correct the first scenario that we inadvertently create the second scenario, and both scenarios are equally problematic.

No one wants inauthenticity. The church thrives when people realize they’re related to one another—family through Christ. Families know one another. They share things. The first church in history “were together and had all things in common” (Acts 2:44). The New Testament lays out “one another” commands fifty-nine times. Each of those commands specifies the duties church members have in loving and caring for one another. A healthy church will be a church where members feel comfortable sharing their deepest struggles and confessing sin. We should strive to ensure that our prayers together reach topics beyond Uncle Dexter’s toothache.

However, we live in a culture where authenticity is equated with struggle. Recently, contemporary author Freya India argued that therapeutic culture often functions as the modern world’s new religion: “[Therapy] is how many of us make sense of loss, of love, of hurt now. We refract our relationships through therapy-speak. We define ourselves by our diagnoses. And we mimic religion, all the time. We don’t pray at night; we repeat positive affirmations. We don’t confess; we trauma dump. We don’t seek salvation; we go on healing journeys. We don’t resist temptation from the devil; we reframe intrusive thoughts. We don’t exorcise evil spirits; we release trauma.” In this cultural shift—what sociologist Philip Rieff in 1966 called the “triumph of the therapeutic”—we’ve gone from normalizing therapeutic speech to making it the dominant narrative of our lives. It’s no longer merely acceptable to talk about mental health struggles; it’s now encouraged almost as a virtue. Better Help makes a lot of money marketing therapy as a normal part of life. Everyone’s doing it. People type their diagnoses on their social media bio lines. If you don’t struggle with something, you’re the problem. You’re not authentic. We’ve gone from saying, “It’s OK to not be OK” to needing to say, “It’s OK to be OK.”

This mindset impacts the church in more ways than I can get into here. But one obvious way is that it perpetuates the myth that if we’re not struggling as Christians, we’re not authentically following Jesus. As a corrective, we need to fight two battles at once. We need to keep telling people that life is hard, the world is fallen, and we all fall short in sin. It’s OK to struggle, and when we do, we need to ask for help, maybe even Better Help. However, we don’t need to equate authenticity with struggle. We need to leave room for people to be authentically happy—for life to go well sometimes. We are in danger of putting all the weight on Paul’s admonition to “weep with those who weep,” completely forgetting that the first half of that verse says, “rejoice with those who rejoice” (Romans 12:15). God is glorified when we both depend on him for help in the valley and thank him for blessing from the mountaintop.

We need to make sure our people understand that it’s OK to be OK.

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