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What can you do when someone you love walks away from their faith? Simply be there for them if possible, and pray.

What can you do when someone you love walks away from their faith? Simply be there for them if possible, and pray.

Here are 12 steps to take when walking through the healing process.

One of the most exciting action sequences in A Quiet Place: Day One ends with the protagonists climbing up from Manhattan’s underground subway network and into a cavernous, quiet church. Barely escaping the sound-attracted alien monsters (called “Death Angels” in the Quiet Place franchise), Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) and Eric (Joseph Quinn) find a haven in the hallowed, quiet space of a damaged-but-still-intact cathedral. They join dozens of other survivors who also found refuge there, some silently kneeling in the pews to pray. This moment reminded me of a similar scene in John Hillcoat’s 2009 film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In that scene, “Man” (Viggo Mortensen) and “Boy” (Kodi Smit-McPhee) share a quiet space of safety in the ruins of a cathedral. Having built a fire to warm them in the cold night, they huddle together under a large cross in the church’s apse. Both A Quiet Place: Day One and The Road offer sometimes bleak but ultimately hopeful visions of how to live when the world is falling apart. And the church—as a distinct eschatological community—is a key part of it. Skeptics might interpret the imagery of these crumbling “haven” cathedrals as emblematic of religion’s last gasp in an increasingly godless world. But I find the imagery beautiful and galvanizing: a reminder that the church should lean into its countercultural distinctives and hold fast to its transcendent identity (see also: The Crown season 6, episode 6). As the world darkens into dog-eat-dog brutality, the church will carry the light of true humanity (Matt. 5:14–16). As the world’s chaotic noise grows deafening, the church will remain a quiet refuge of hope for the weary and worried. Church: Beacon of Humanity in an Animalistic World Both A Quiet Place and The Road are post-apocalyptic survivor stories that lean heavily into questions about surviving with our humanity intact. In harsh worlds where the drive to survive has led many people to resort to cannibalistic brutality, what motivates someone to live sacrificially, putting the interests of others above his own? The Quiet Place franchise is built around the Christian virtue of sacrificial love, and it shows up powerfully in each of the three films. In the church scene in A Quiet Place: Day One, for example, Eric risks his life to track down an abandoned pharmacy to get Sam the medicine she needs. From the start of the film, Sam is a terminally ill woman living in a hospice facility. Her time is short. In a world of Darwinian survival, no one would put his life on the line to save the dying Sam. Yet Eric sees Sam (a total stranger to him just a few hours earlier) in tremendous pain, and something motivates him to boldly venture out of the church to find medicine to alleviate her pain, while the Death Angels swarm all around. As the world darkens into dog-eat-dog brutality, the church will carry the light of true humanity. Elsewhere we see other characters risk their lives to help others—it’s a theme in the film from start to finish. What’s this sacrificial impulse that undermines fleshly self-preservation in favor of saving others, even strangers? Selfless love. It was a radical concept when Jesus introduced it in the kill-or-be-killed ancient world, and it’s just as radical in a dystopian apocalypse. In our post-Christian world, Christian virtues like self-giving and sacrificial love still exist. In The Road, this is “the fire” that must be carried on. Even if its source is dimmer and dimmer, and its logic more and more absurd in a brutish world, the fire still burns. And the church is the kindling that carries it on from generation to generation. Church: Sanctuary of Rest in an Exhausting World A Quiet Place and The Road also underscore the church as a place of rest and shelter. The characters in both films sleep and replenish their health in the church. Momentarily free from the terrors outside—monsters, marauders, and an exhausting pursuit of salvation—they can recalibrate and tend to one another, taking deep breaths and being still. For them, the church is a hospital for healing and a hospitable inn for resting—a dwelling place built on the words of Matthew 11:28–30. Does the church have this reputation today? Arguably, no. Because in far too many instances, dangers are inside the church too. This is why it must be a perennial concern for churches to guard against wolves, ensuring God’s house is a haven of health defined by Jesus-centric worship and the collective pursuit of holiness, rather than self-serving interests and individual power grabs. The encouraging news is that, on the ground, many biblically faithful churches are drawing the weary, the hurting, the vulnerable, and the exhausted into communities of safe, gospel-fueled restoration and hope. At their best, churches are havens from the horrors of life outside (including horrors caused by our own sin). For those at the end of their rope, barely outrunning whatever their version of the Death Angels might be, the church is a place where they can find footing on the solid ground of Scripture and renewal by the Spirit working among God’s people. Church: Quiet Haven in a Noisy World Finally, A Quiet Place reminds us the church at its best is a quiet refuge amid the cacophonous maelstrom. In the film’s sci-fi world, noise is death and quiet is life. Could there be a better metaphor for the dynamics of our digital age? Our world is noisier than ever. A chorus of frenzied voices surround us online, shouting with the megaphones of social media or through the siren-song enticements of Lady Folly algorithms. The nonstop noise is killing us, numbing our ability to hear truth and eliminating all silence from our lives—the silence essential for prayer, contemplation, and growing in wisdom. The nonstop noise is killing us, numbing our ability to hear truth and eliminating all silence from our lives. Rather than mirroring the noisy culture, churches should recognize they can offer what more and more people are hungry for: silence, awe, reverence, stillness before God. The best way to draw Gen Z and Gen Alpha to church will not be adding to the ways they’re shouted at constantly, via apps and ads and influencers; rather, it will be to invite them into an escape from all that, into a sacred space of unhurried presence, quiet reverence, embodied worship, and collective encounter with the living God. In an ever-more brutal, harried, and loud world, Jesus Christ’s church can be the quiet place we so desperately need.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, about one in five Americans deals with some kind of mental illness, and about one in 20 Americans has a mental illness so severe that it seriously affects their lives. What Christians ought to make of this and how we ought to respond to the idea of “mental illness” in the first place have both been open points of debate for decades. John Andrew Bryant’s theological memoir A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ doesn’t engage with those debates directly. Instead, Bryant—a writer and part-time street pastor—narrates his experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), including his time in a psych ward and his recovery from the worst of that OCD. He weaves his theological reflections throughout the narrative.  Mental Illness Is Suffering The Christian life involves suffering. This suffering is always the result of sin in a general sense, but it isn’t always the result of someone’s specific sin (John 9). Many Christians understand this when it comes to cancer but not to mental illness. Bryant has the right idea, though: “It has been important for me over the years to not understand a mental illness as a character flaw or a lack of faith when it is simply an Affliction, a kind of Suffering among other kinds of Suffering. I simply have a brain that provides horrors to be seen and felt” (8). As with cancer, personal sin can sometimes lead to or exacerbate mental illness, but much of mental illness is the result of the physical and noetic effects of the fall. The good news for suffering saints is threefold. First, Christ suffered too. He knows our afflictions and our sorrows because he has shared them. Second, he is with us. We are never left to suffer alone. Third, God uses our suffering to deliver us from the lie that we can depend on ourselves for our well-being. Bryant captures this reality as well as anyone I have ever read. “Nothing has disfigured me more cruelly than my dependence on myself” (177). The way out of that self-dependence is simply—painfully, with great difficulty, but simply—turning to Christ. Recovery Isn’t Guaranteed Good as this word is, Bryant missteps by consistently coupling his dependence on Christ to his experience of recovery: How did I walk out of the psych ward and back into my life? . . . It was done with the trust I had in Christ. It was only done with a patient, quiet understanding of who Christ is. (148) Not everyone gets to leave mental illness behind—and a continued struggle isn’t necessarily because of a failure to trust in Christ. Some Christians live with crushing depression that renders them simultaneously suicidal, and angry that they’re suicidal. Others suffer schizophrenic hallucinations that so disconnect them from reality that they might harm others through no ill will of their own. Those men and women also stand under the mercy of God. The good news is that Christ keeps us, not the other way around. Bryant comes close to seeing this. He acknowledges his recovery has meant the ability to live with OCD rather than to be healed from it. Yet he writes that his “dependence on Christ was the only thing that couldn’t be taken from [him]” (72). But what of the people for whom that dependence has been taken from them by a psychotic break? The good news is that Christ keeps us, not the other way around. Inadequate Definition of Sin Theologically, I expect the world-ruining effects of the fall to affect our brains no less than the rest of our bodies. I therefore don’t doubt the value of therapy when needed. Pharmaceutical treatments can function as a life jacket for someone drowning in his own mind. My wife’s life was saved by the combination of good therapists and good psychiatric medication. But not everyone is mentally ill. What is needful for someone suffering from a severe mental illness isn’t necessarily good for everyone else. Moreover, therapeutic understandings can deform our theology when they aren’t framed by Scripture. We see this in the way Bryant explains his doctrine of sin. He writes, Sin is not, ultimately, a thought or a feeling or act. Sin is perspective, it is a way of looking at things, it is what things are to us. Sin is like that Siren. It is always quietly working in the background, turning the world into what it isn’t. Sin is not a thought or feeling. Sin is a lie. Sin is a bad expectation. (175) Sin certainly distorts our perspective, but it absolutely includes our thoughts and feelings and acts. Excluding them undermines the clear call to repentance for “what we have done and what we have left undone,” as the Book of Common Prayer has it. Pharmaceutical treatments can function as a life jacket for someone drowning in his own mind. It’s easy to see how Bryant might have landed here. His treatment rightly involved learning not to treat every thought he experiences as one he’s culpable for. Yet this definition of sin doesn’t follow; it’s inadequate. There are times when repentance and sanctification are important parts of dealing with mental illness. Theological memoirs go beyond mere narration into theological claims. It’s hard for the author to avoid saying more than he should. The danger is that it’s often easier for readers to accept those claims when they come couched in someone’s experiences. Read Carefully All of us need to see more clearly that Christ is with us through our suffering. Bryant rightly reminds us that the final word on our suffering is what God does with it: We are not, thank God, what we can think, or what we will do. We are not our thoughts and not even our wills. We are what the Word of God will make of us. (124) Bryant’s story serves as a moving (if florid) account of how God has used his suffering through OCD to bring him into much deeper dependence on Christ. His book can help reframe the suffering of those struggling with mental illness in particular. Yet we have to carefully sift both our experiences and the understandings gleaned by common grace through the content of Scripture to determine what’s true. This book deserves to be read carefully.

Don Carson teaches on the importance of obedience to God and his Word as a true demonstration of knowing him, as emphasized in 1 John 2:3–27. Central to the Christian life is having and displaying a genuine love for others, which Carson highlights as a key indicator of living in the light of Christ. He contrasts those who merely talk about faith with those who act on it and discusses the dangers of worldliness versus godliness. Carson also explores the cultural differences in expressing faith through his observations of diverse groups at Cambridge. He addresses the concept of antichrists and the end times in 1 John 2, urging believers to persevere in their faith and remember their hope in Christ.

I'd love to see the return of the "Washington Redskins" brand

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