Is Jesus the Answer to the Anxiety, Depression, and Suicide Epidemic? | Jacob Coyne

What's up, guys? This is Ben Pierce from Provoke and Inspire, and today's episode is awesome. I had the privilege of interviewing Jacob Coyne. He is a preacher, an author, and he's an Internet influencer. And that word kinda gets tossed around a lot, but this guy is no joke.

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He has over a million followers on TikTok, 1,620,000 subscribers on YouTube, almost 200,000 Instagram followers. And on social media, he basically just shares the gospel. I mean, he's very authentic. He's very clear. He's very heartfelt.

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But one of the things Jacob is most known for is his work in the whole mental health space. He started an organization called Stay Here and also wrote a book with the same title, Stay Here, Uncovering God's Plan to Restore Your Mental Health. He went through a period of time where a lot of people around him he was very close to were committing suicide. And so somewhat reluctantly, he was pulled into this space because he felt like he had no choice but to bring Jesus into this very dark worldwide global epidemic. And so we had an amazing conversation talking about mental health, how did we get here, what has the church gotten wrong about this topic, How can we address it?

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We looked at technology and social media and the whole gambit related to this topic, and I promise this is going to be useful for you. As he says during this episode, there is almost no one in fact, I would just say there is no one who doesn't deal with this either personally or has someone close to them dealing with this, with depression, suicidal thoughts, anxiety. And so this podcast is critical to listen to all the way through. It's critical to share. This could be the difference for somebody in your life.

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So I highly recommend checking it out and sharing it with others. Again, this podcast is part of Steiger where we have a heart to reach those who are not going to walk into a church, and we are particularly interested in reaching this global youth culture that is so impacted by secularism and tragically is dealing with the brunt of this mental health crisis. And so we need to understand it. We need to know how to speak truth into it. And so conversations like this are critical.

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We need you to be involved in Steiger. This work is simply too big for a few of us to do. It takes all of us. Go to steiger.org, steiger.0rg, to find out how you can get involved. And finally, if this podcast in general or this specific episode speaks to you, consider sharing it.

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As I said, word-of-mouth is still the best way to get the word out. And if you would do that, that would mean a ton to me. We are passionate about radically following Jesus and lifting him up outside of the church, and we hope that you have been encouraged by these conversations, by being part of these conversations. So check it out. Subscribe to this if you haven't already.

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Share it with someone who doesn't yet know, and, that's it. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jacob Korn. You're listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. Alright, man. We're going already.

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We're recording. Awesome. It's a hot mic. Love having you here. Dude, Jacob, thank you.

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Thank you for being on our podcast. Thanks for having me, Ben. It's awesome. So, we we just were sharing our, our mutual family lives. We're both well in need of the coffee that we have in front of us, so that's great.

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Cheers digitally. But yeah. Dude, so you have entered in for those that don't know you, like I said, I'll introduce you off air in a different moment, but they'll know you now. And you have entered into a very difficult conversation. Yeah.

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And even as we were praying just before this started, I felt just maybe even a tiny bit of of what God might feel for kids that are going through mental health struggles, not just young people, but the world. Mhmm. And I really feel like if we could fully grasp God's heart for the mental health crisis, we wouldn't be able to move. I think we'd be so immobilized by his love, but this is not an easy topic, man. You could have chosen a lot of things that were a lot lighter.

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Why this? Why this topic? Why have you put yourself into this hard space? Yeah. I mean, I'm looking at my I'm at my desk right now in Stay Here's office, and, I'm looking at this picture of my uncle.

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This is my uncle Greg right here for anyone watching. This is him as a teenager, and he's just, like, such a this is a Christian podcast, but he's such a bat a kinda guy. Like, he's on a Yamaha motorcycle right here. I'll make sure we blur the a out, don't worry. Don't worry.

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That is a little bit. Crazy, man, on a Yamaha motorcycle, and that was just him just living living life to the fullest. And he got Parkinson's disease, and the disease just ate away at his life and his brain, and he was really suffering, and he took his own life. And that was the start of it for me, losing an uncle who was like a father figure to me. It hurt it hurt deeply.

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I miss him every day, and he's been gone for for quite a few years now. Lost him in 02/2015, so it's almost it's almost been ten years. And besides my uncle, I've lost a pastor friend to suicide. I've lost students to suicide in in youth ministry when I was a youth pastor, and, I've lost a stepbrother to a drug overdose. So, you know, I just thought I was gonna be a pastor.

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I was a pastor. I was a Bible teacher, and I thought that that was just the my whole life calling was to be a senior pastor of a church. At the church I was on staff at in Washington state, it was a large church, and, you know, I thought the whole road for me was to be a youth pastor, then a Bible teacher, then a campus pastor, then the senior pastor you know, you kinda just keep stepping up the the ministry ladder, I guess. Yeah. But, you know, this pain of losing loved ones, losing artists that you love, people like Anthony Bourdain or Chester Bennington, Robin Williams, people that you love and admire, you grew up watching and adoring.

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You you even people like that, it it begins to hurt. And you you begin to wonder I began to wonder, is this just inevitable? Am I gonna keep losing family to suicide and drug overdoses? Am I gonna keep losing pastors to suicide, students to suicide? So in 2019, I started doing research on suicide prevention.

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The first thing I looked for was what are the top Christian organizations that are focusing on this topic? Who are the top Christian speakers that are speaking on this topic? Are they in the schools? Are they on campuses? What are they doing?

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And to be honest with you, Ben, I couldn't find more than a handful. And that was pretty alarming because Yeah. There was a lot of worldly ones, and, you know, I love the work that they do, and it's very meaningful and powerful. But I think that as a Christian, we have more of an upper hand because we have Jesus and Yeah. Jesus didn't shy away from helping people with mental illness in scripture.

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This is something that Jesus is very familiar with and he's very able to help anybody and everybody struggling with depression, anxiety, self hatred. He he heals people that are dealing with that in the gospels in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So I was real I was really discouraged when I couldn't find many organizations or speakers on this topic, especially knowing that, you know, Christians invented health care. Like, we started Mhmm. The hospitals.

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So this is something that we should be leading the charge in, and that's a whole another podcast about, you know, Christians leading the charge and Christians leading culture. But that's what got me to wanna start this was seeing that there was a major gap. And then also researching and understanding that suicide is not inevitable. Suicide is preventable. It's absolutely preventable.

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And the more we keep speaking, and and the more these organizations keep posting that it's inevitable, the more suicides we're going to see. So we started Stay Here in 2019. We became a nonprofit in 2020 right before the pandemic. And that was just wild timing, wild timing to start an organization like that. And so we've been going strong for over four years now, and we reach millions of people every month online and and through our blogs, through our training, or just in person with with training churches in person or doing stay here events or myself preaching at schools or churches.

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It's been an incredible journey, and it it is very difficult. I I wouldn't wanna do something like that. I would never just sign up to lead something like this. I'm emotional just talking about it. It's it's very heavy.

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But when you lose people and you you get phone calls and emails from people that reach out to other organizations and they hear nothing back. They just hear a canned chat GBT email back. I I wanna answer those emails. I wanna answer those calls and be there Yeah. To shepherd those people that are dealing with loss, severe loss of losing a brother or a son to suicide.

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So that's why we started Stay Here because there is this gap. And sometimes God calls you to fill the gap even though you don't want to. But the more and more we just keep saying yes to this call, the more and more we see that it was worth it because we are saving lives. Yeah. So how did we get here?

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I mean, I feel like, you know, that's kind of the classic next question. Right? You see articles coming out all the time about the reasons we're in this mental health crisis. But, you know, one thing you said that was interesting is that, you know, we have the Christian perspective, which means we view the world fundamentally different from the world, the way they view themselves. And they lack the diagnostic tools to even understand why they're in the position that they're in.

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They can look at societal issues or various things. And and I'm sure, as you'll say, it's a composite of many things. There's not usually probably just one answer. But what would you say is kind of a missing piece of why we're in this position as a world, as certainly as a western world in this mental health crisis? Yeah.

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I think it's the severity of how isolated we all are. We could we could talk on screens and stuff, but and and we could post stuff on social media, but people are isolated. That's not a real third place. There's a doctor who just came out with a report this year that he's he believes that the tide to suicide, the rise in suicides, is because there is a decline in third places, third spaces. And, the church or communal places would be considered a third space or third place.

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Sure. And I think that because of the rise of secularism, there's a decline in third places. And, people are aren't attending church as often as they used to. And there's even a Harvard study that came out in 2022 that says that this is crazy. Like, this is a Harvard study saying that, there's a direct tie to church attendance, helping people overcome drug addiction, alcohol addiction, and suicide or depression or anxiety.

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Like, just going to church, attending church has a direct tie to people getting freedom from those issues. So I think, you know, the isolation, the lack of community, it's huge. It's an epidemic. We're so lonely. People are so lonely.

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You know, posting stuff online or even FaceTimes and Zoom calls, it doesn't cut it. I I had I had a pastor my my pastor now, here in Johnson City, Tennessee. When I was living in Vancouver, Washington, I asked him to be a mentor to me, And he said, no. I could be a good friend over phone calls and Zoom calls, but I can't mentor you. Interesting.

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I can't pastor you if you're living in a different location. We need to be in the same place. I wanna be able to come to your house, and I want you to come to my house. We need to share meals together. We need to be in the same place together because then I could really see how you're really doing.

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Because you could hide behind a Zoom call. You could lie on a FaceTime. But when I'm face to face with you, I could really see what's in your eyes, and I could really see the way you're living your life, and I could really help you. Then I could really mentor you. So, no, I'm not gonna mentor you until you move here.

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So well, I live here now. Yeah. So I guess you're listening. Yeah. An incredible, you know, even for my whole family.

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Yeah. So that's what we really try to communicate at Stay Here is like, you can't win this battle alone. You need a community around you to support you, and you need to be able to contribute to community. So that's I think that's the biggest issue in my opinion. It's it's the lack of community.

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It's isolation. You said that secularism there's, like, an inverse relationship between third places and secularism, which I find very interesting from a worldview perspective. So what is it in your mind about secularism that's eroding these natural places for community to form? Yeah. I think within secularism, there's individualism, and I I think that people want to you know, it's it's in the book of the satanic book, do as you will.

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Do as thou wilt. Being a part of something where you have to lay down your own self is something that nobody wants to do. It's it's very difficult to do. We love self. We love the idolization of self.

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And that's I think we've we're seeing it now in culture more than ever, the idol of self, the idol of your own self made image. But to be a part of a church community, you gotta lay that down. You gotta serve other people. You gotta serve the vision of the house. You gotta serve God's vision.

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You gotta be a part of something bigger than yourself, and that's very difficult for people to lay down. And I think also within, you know, secularism, we see a great disdain towards the church and towards Christianity. It's it's wild. I mean, the comments I get are so funny on social media. It's just wild.

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I chuckle. At first, it was just sad, but I'm like, man, sky daddy, this follower of sky daddy is what they call it. It's just stuff like that. But I I think that that's it's a major issue is is the the love and idolization of self when Jesus calls us to deny self. It's so sad to me that the way the enemy and the world perverts truth, right, and takes the very thing paradoxically, the very thing we need to be loved, to be in community, to find that meaning and fulfillment in that context is self denial.

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Yeah. And that's so hard for the world to understand because it sounds like such a paradox. Like, wait. To find myself, I need to deny myself, which, of course, is essentially exactly what Jesus said. Yep.

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And yet that that's exactly it. I mean, I heard some random quote the other day that said true maturity is when you finally get to the point where you care about someone else more than yourself. Wow. And I was like, okay. That that's humbling.

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Mhmm. The sad irony, as you said, is if you continue to make yourself the center, you end up in the center by yourself. Wow. You kind of create the prison. You lock the door and you throw out the key and Uh-huh.

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Even things I'd imagine, like, you know, the delaying of committed relationships like marriage and then even further, a delaying in this rising of, you know, a disdain for kids and how that's seen as the ultimate subjugation and capitulation to losing your identity in yourself. Uh-huh. Something about kids, and I think you could agree Uh-huh. Kids produce that other focus most naturally. Like, even my wife, I love her.

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Right? But she doesn't produce the selflessness that's required almost, like, intrinsically the way my kids do. My kids just force me to think about them more than myself. Yes. And so would you say that it's just permeated even the way we're avoiding the kinds of necessary next steps societally that would build community.

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Like, hello. Family is community. Right? It's pretty hard to feel alone when you're surrounded by screaming kids who want waffles. Right?

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So would you say that that's part of it too? It's just permeated everything the way we're running our lives. Absolutely. I was just at a birthday dinner last night, and most of the men there were were married and have kids, but there is a couple that were single and younger. And, one of them was just asking, like, Jacob, just drop me some wisdom.

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Like, how do you how do you really get refined? How do you get into the refineries fire more than you know? Ready for what was coming, was it? I was like, man, get married and have kids. Like, get in the fire before.

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You're like, you don't wanna be a a a crappy person and be broken in marriage. You know? You wanna be a whole person. But, man, you when you think you're a whole person, then you get married, and then you have kids, you realize, gosh, there's a long way to go. There's still a long way to go.

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But, I mean, man, I mean, even this this morning, I'm doing stuff for my kids that I don't wanna do. Oh. Like, I'm on my roof this morning, taking down a wasp nest. Like Yeah. Because it's outside of my daughter's it's my daughter's window.

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And I'm like, no. They're not getting in my daughter's window. I'm taking this thing down. I might get stung a couple times, but I'm doing this with my kid. So this is this is daily stuff.

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And, you know, I mean, this is daily stuff you're doing, but I couldn't imagine how terrible of a person I would be or naive of a person I would be if I wasn't married with children. If I chose to just be like, I'm I'm living this whole this whole thing all alone because I wanna do I wanna live my best life. No. Your best life is when you you lay your life down for people that you love. Yeah.

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Yeah. One of the great ways I heard it described was was actually by Abigail Schrier. Have you heard of her the, irreversible damage? And then she also wrote bad therapy. I'm I gotta imagine you heard of that.

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I mean, that's, like, secular. I mean, I I think she's maybe nominally Catholic or something like that. But, she basically said the problem is we approach kids like consumers. Like Uh-huh. No.

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You would never like, the way you choose a latte, that's not how you view kids. It's more like shedding your old skin and putting on the the more mature self. It's like it's painful, and it's it's a process. But, no, if you approach it like, what do I want? A vacation or kids?

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Yeah. No wonder if that's the mindset you're going into approaching that. I know this is kinda tangential, but it's on my mind clearly, and I imagine it'd be yours too. So Yep. So so yeah.

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Obviously, the worldview aspect of this is crucial and sad. But to flip it on ourselves for a second, what is the church getting wrong about this? What are we not understanding, or how have we hurt our ability to play a vital role by the way that we've responded to the mental health crisis? Yes. I think the church has got it wrong because we have made this topic so taboo, so taboo.

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I mean, the church invented the term commit suicide. That's from the church. Yikes. We invented that term, committed suicide. So, you know, we made it a crime, and we don't like to talk about these topics because we think that more professional minded people should be handling this.

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Let's just shift these people off to doctors and therapists. But man, this is the biggest problem because if you really, I see this everywhere I go when I'm speaking at churches. When I ask and every pastor, there there's not a dry eye. I ask pastors, keep your eyes open and watch. When I'm done with a message on the topic of mental health in a church, I will ask the congregation, is there anybody here who has had suicidal thoughts this year?

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And is there anybody here who has a plan? You have a date. You've been writing it down in your journal. You've been setting up. You've been making arrangements for this.

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I want you to raise your hand and look at me. And every time I cry because the amount of hands and eyes that I see when I make that call, there's never the number is never zero. It's always in the tens, the twenties, so many struggling people. And I always have those people run up to me. Thank you so much, Jacob, that you're talking about this.

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I've never heard this before. I'm so glad that I get to be at a church that's talking about this topic. So then I'll go up to the pastor after that, and I'm like, you better keep talking about this because now people expect you to talk about this, and you should because look how much freedom just took place. So I think that that's why the church the church has got it wrong because we don't talk about it. We don't open up the altar for this topic, and we think that it's it's too complicated of a topic to talk about.

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It's not. It's not. So that's that's why at Stay Here, like, we made a suicide prevention training, and it's it's easy. It's about an hour long, and you could take it online. And when you take this training, you have enough tools to help prevent a suicide or at least talk to somebody that's struggling with suicidal thoughts or depression or anxiety or self hatred, self harm.

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So I think that's the biggest issue is we just don't talk about it. We don't know how to talk about it. We're not bringing this topic up, and people are just silently dying, slowly dying inside the pews. Yeah. I feel like I think part of what makes it so hard is that tension between choice, What are we doing to contribute?

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Like, what what is it about my behavior that needs to change? Yeah. And what is it, like, something that is being imposed on me? And we we have I think this is especially a very an American idea, but I think we have this glorification of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps and Yep. Everything that is good, I did.

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Everything that's bad can simply be fixed by better choices or or just more sincere spiritual disciplines or whatever. And so I think we feel this tension. Right? Because we don't wanna create a church full of, quote, unquote, victims. I know it sounds terrible.

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Yeah. Yeah. How do you navigate that? Because even as I'm speaking, you can tell that I don't quite understand how to navigate that, and I'm sure there's no perfect answer, but how would you respond? Man, I think it's it's a tough answer because you wish, like, this is, this is what so many pastors probably wish is, like, I can just bring up suicide, do one altar call, or anxiety, do one altar call, and pray for everyone.

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Bam. In the name of Jesus, be free. And everyone's free. And that's just not all that's not the case. It's everyone has a different issue that they're walking through.

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Some people do get free just by confessing. I've been struggling with suicidal thoughts, but I don't wanna die. Now I've I've confessed it. Sometimes the freedom just comes in confessing it. That's it.

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It's been such a big burden on you. You confessed it at the altar. You confessed it in a meeting with a pastor or a friend at coffee, and now it's gone. That's amazing. But some people, they need some they need serious help, and that requires discipleship.

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And in and in discipleship, sometimes you gotta disciple people into a therapist's office or a doctor's office, or you gotta have a hard conversation. And, man, this is a tough topic because this is we really you know, we're we're talking about self idolization. We don't like to talk about the things we consume and eat and our lifestyle choices, but so much of mental illness is tied to our lifestyle choices. Yeah. What you're watching, what you're consuming, what you're listening to, what you're eating, what you're not eating, how you're sleeping, your exercise, how often are you going outside, like, little just simple things like that.

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You'd be surprised how many people are like, I'm depressed. No. You eat terrible food, and you don't sleep. That's why you feel that way. Mhmm.

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Go sleep eight hours a night or as as much as you can, and eat right. Like, get your diet back together. Go to the gym, and and you will be okay. I've helped so many people walk in that direction. They're like, oh my gosh.

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I didn't need to take medication, but some people do need medic so so what I'm trying to say is it's not a one size fits all solution. Right. And that's why, you know, we have a call at the as Christians to disciple people. And the Bible says, love suffers long. Love suffers long.

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Love perseveres. Yeah. And that's the love of Jesus. When people just keep coming to you again and again, they're like, I'm still struggling. We say, I still will love you.

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I will love you, and we're gonna get through this thing together. The last thing I wanna say though, and it's, it's a difficult thing is I think, people do need to also take responsibility of their own pain. And, you know, if you were if you were hurt as a child, if you've been abused, we can't just keep blaming the people our entire lives and always be bound. You've got to take responsibility and find healing because you still have a life to live. You don't need to be the victim, but you've got to, you've got to put some effort into it and actually try to find healing.

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Talk to people about it, find a great counselor, pastor, do what you need to do to find healing because it's possible. Encounter the Lord. Like, there's so many there's so many ways to find healing, but I think that a lot of us are just waiting for somebody to do all the work for us. But you gotta take responsibility for your own pain and find healing. Yeah.

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I think I think the problem is in the lack of nuance, right, and also wanting to kinda have a a blanketed perspective on the whole thing. And like you said Yep. I think the challenge is that when I was younger, it felt like it was ADD. It's like that became the thing, and then everybody had it. And then then but then sort of those that truly suffered probably suffered worse because of the social contagion Yep.

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And the misdiagnosis and the overdiagnosis. And then now I feel like it's anxiety, depression, and it's probably similar, right, where it's on a spectrum, and there are those who have they have real physiological neurochemical issues that are probably always gonna be there, and they have to manage it, and they have to do all the right things. But like a physical ailment, life is broken. And fortunately, we have hope in this life. We have a, you know, a a savior who's not unsympathetic, but then we have hope for beyond it.

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But then there's probably a lot of people moving down that spectrum, as you said, that some of them need to confess it and get their lifestyle in order. Others, it's more of a weakness that's gonna always kind of be there, like, you know, lust for some guys more than others, but we're probably all susceptible on some level. And, yeah, I I feel like that's maybe the struggle, right, is that we we've gotta have the ability to be sophisticated enough to recognize the nuance and then the care. I don't know. The mentality in church that that discipleship is a one on one slow, messy process.

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There's always gonna be that way, and and we might have to maybe even reorganize church to accommodate that to some degree because Yeah. Have we over professionalized some aspects of the church to the point where we don't have the resources to disciple like we need to Mhmm. Because there's this small church staff and this giant church body. Yep. And maybe that's part of the issue.

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Yes, man. Yeah. I what we're doing at our church is we've we have this thing right now called tribes, and the the weight is off of the senior leadership team. Sure. Yeah.

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They they're still they're obviously still pastoring at shepherding, but it's not a thousand people all knocking on the pastor's door. Right. Because we have strong tribes. Not anyone could lead a tribe. A tribe what I mean by that is just like a small group.

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It's just a cool name for a small group. Yep. But these are leaders in the church that are leading these things. My wife leads one. She's lead leading one for homeschool moms who homeschool.

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And it's in our house, and there's ministry going on in there. It's they're not just like reading through a book and talking about homeschool all day. There's moms that are that are crying on the couch, getting prayer, having other moms speak life over them, them confessing some of their biggest issues that they're going with, that that they're going through. That's going on all across our church, and our church is such a healthy community because of that. Because when tribes end, I think tribes last about six to eight weeks.

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And when tribes end, those people are still hanging out. Tribes never really end here at our church. So, but you've got to open up your house. You got to open up the table and let other people in if you really wanna see people set free. And there there's a cost to that.

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Yeah. Yeah. Along those lines, and I I'm trying to figure out how controversial this might be, but I think it's worth it. I one of the thoughts I've struggled with is that I feel like the whole role of counseling and therapy is stigmatized Uh-huh. Unnecessarily.

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I find it always so bizarre as as someone who's been married for fifteen years in January that premarital counseling is, like, so widely accepted as something cool and kosher, but mid marriage therapy, which, let's be honest, as married men would probably be way more useful when you're actually dealing with real things Yep. Is kinda seen as like, oh, like, you were knocking on divorce's doorstep here? Like, what's going on? Like, is this the last ditch effort? And I find that I find that ridiculous.

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Right? Because Uh-huh. What what do you have to talk about? Premarital counseling. I mean, you're infatuated.

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You just wanna, for obvious reasons, you wanna get that ceremony over with. You just you can't wait to be married. Everything's great. Three years in, man, now we got something to talk about. Uh-huh.

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So first of all, why is therapy so stigmatized? Then maybe the more difficult end of this conversation is, has therapy become too professionalized? And what I mean by that is, hey. You should go get therapy for a $150 an hour. Yeah.

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Like, okay. That that's a pretty big barrier. Like, and I'm not I'm not saying that there aren't professionals who haven't worked hard, who don't deserve to get paid well, but it's like, at least I I talked to older men, older women, and they say that that there were roles in the church that maybe didn't pass for, like, totally professional therapists. Mhmm. But that was more of a free resource that the church gladly and willingly offered.

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Feel like, man, that would be really useful to get rid of the stigma and maybe lower that price a little bit to get more people in the door to talk through some of these things. Yeah. Man, very stigmatized. I mean Yeah. My first time in a therapist's office, I cried because I was embarrassed as a pastor to be in there.

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Yeah. But I learned I learned sooner than later that I needed this in six months into therapy in a big crisis. Like, we went in my wife and I went into therapy together. We were in crisis. Our marriage wasn't in crisis.

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Our faith was in crisis. We were pastors at a church, and, we had all hell break loose. We had our pastor, go into crazy moral failures, and we were, some whistleblowers in the middle of that. So we got some serious backlash and stuff. It was crazy.

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We lost our stepbrother to a drug overdose, and then we had a miscarriage all in June 2018. So we were, like, bankrupt with our our faith. It it and it was we were just completely broken. I I remember every day crying myself to sleep in that month. And and through into July and August, it was so difficult.

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So we were desperate for therapy, and it took a while to find therapy, which is, you know, on the other end now, I'm thinking, I'm so glad I wasn't a sue I wasn't suicidal. Imagine, like, being that hurt and and waiting months and months to find therapy. Yeah. You don't know who else to talk to. You don't know what to do because everyone else is hurting, and you can't talk to people in the church on staff Right.

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Because we're all hurting. We're all going through the similar stuff right now. So therapy was paramount for my wife and I, and, and we, we found the right person, thankfully. I've seen three different counselors in my walk with Jesus, and I've had a bad one. It was a it was a one time meeting.

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He I think he needed some help. I don't know. He had a breakdown when I was talking. It was so weird. And he was like, sorry.

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I gotta end the meeting. I don't know what stopped. Charged you, I hope. You know, he said it was pro bono. I was like, great.

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It should be pro bono. This is this is wild, dude. Hey. I had I had a dentist drill into my tooth one time, relook at the X-ray, and say, oh, shoot. Doesn't look like you have a cavity.

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Hey. We won't charge you. After he numbed me up and was, like, already drilling. That's terrible. I feel you.

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Mine was more physical. Yours was perhaps a little more psychological. But either way, thank you for the free disservice you just offered me with carry on. That's terrible. Yeah.

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So, yeah, I mean, huge, hugely taboo, especially for Christians because it's like, man, what? You have a faith issue? Why do you need to go to therapy? What's wrong with you? Shouldn't you just pray and you'll be free?

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Or maybe you have a maybe you don't read the Bible enough. No. We the Bible, it's very clear. We need to confess to other people. We need to talk to other people, get wisdom from other people.

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Like, this is clear all throughout scripture. From Genesis to Revelation, we need people. So there's that. But I I, I also think that, we could put too much of I think you were talking about the professionalism Yeah. Of it and the the price.

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I mean, golly. It's how do you afford something like that, especially right now? Well, that's my point. That's that's I mean, on our website, we have free therapy for for four sessions, thankfully, from BetterHelp, and they have Christian therapy attached to that, which is great, faithful counseling. That's four sessions.

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And then after that, you've you've if you wanna continue, you've got to pay the fee, a $100,120 bucks an hour or what it whatever it may be now. That's so hard, especially after getting free therapy for a few sessions, and that's the best thing we can offer. But we also have a free chat line that you can always access on our website, and it's from it's believers leading it. It's called the Hope Line, and that's really helpful. But I think, you know, back to the church stepping up, we need to step up, And this is something that we need to learn.

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We need to learn how to listen. We need to learn how to speak into people's lives. We need to learn how to help people who are in crisis, because it's tough for people to afford that. And, and even before you can afford it, the wait the the four month wait, the six month wait to finally meet with somebody, that's that's pretty rough. Yeah.

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This obviously could be an entirely different podcast, so maybe we touch on this quick. You know, obviously, the connection between the Internet for a myriad of reasons, social media, like, it doesn't feel like a trope. It doesn't feel tired because it's so relevant. But as someone who's obviously found quite a lot of success on the Internet, just hit me with some thoughts related to our phones. And, again, I think it's easy to to look at maybe gen alpha, gen z as it relates to the phone, but I almost feel like they're awakening to it maybe even more I think so.

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Of the older generations. I mean, I've heard this whole idea of them describing themselves as digital captives. Like, they they feel captive to it now where there's studies coming out all the time where I think I just saw one. It might have been New York Times where it said, like, over half of Gen z interviewed wish that TikTok was never invented, and yet they're spending hours and hours on it still. I mean, that's classic addiction.

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Right? I don't even want this thing, but I can't stop. Totally. What do we what do we do with this thing, man? Like, where is this heading?

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And I don't know. This is a huge conversation, I know, but I'd love to pick your brain on it, and then maybe we could do another one on this some other time. Yeah. I I hope there's a day where we we all just have dumb phones. That would be the best.

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I mean, maybe you're on Instagram and I'm a millennial, so you see these reels come up around TikTok where it's like childhood in the nineties, and it's just a slideshow. There's no phones. There's no, Facebook, Myspace, Instagram, TikTok. We it was safe. That's great.

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And we were just playing outside, imagining things. And, you know, I I see videos of, like, young kids trying to be influencers with their parents and stuff. And for me, I I never post my kids on social media. I don't want them to want to be an influencer. I don't want that for them.

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I don't want them to see me, like, working on videos, filming videos and stuff, or making content because I don't want them to be like, I want I wanna be famous. I wanna be on social media. I wanna make content. Like, the this is just like Stay Here where I felt like God called me to lead this organization. Same thing with this.

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Like, it was 2020 before the pandemic, and I felt like the Holy Spirit said, go on TikTok and start sharing your testimony of why you started following Jesus. Start sharing stories of healings that you've seen, miracles you've seen. And I'm just sharing stories, and I have no idea how to make, like, good content. And I think by, like, April 2020, I had 400,000 followers on that that app, and then it went to over, like, a million followers in 2020. I hardly am on that app anymore, posting.

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And, you know, I tell I tell my wife this all the time. If all my social media got banned or deleted, I would just cry with tears of joy. It would be amazing. If all this shut down, I would be so happy. This is to me, I just feel called by God to do it.

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I make the content, post it, and I try to get away from it as fast as I can, because it's not good for you. It's not good. You you compare yourself to others. You feel like you're missing out. You're you become addicted to consumerism.

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You see a new clothing item, a new gadget, the new iPhone that just came out, new furniture, and you're like, man, that that looks better in their home. I want that in mind. And we just become, we, we, we lose creativity. We lose our own sense of purpose because we want to live everyone else's dreams. And we don't get to live ours because we're living other people's fantasies and dreams because we're just comparing ourselves.

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I think it's I I hope it shuts down. Yeah. There's I mean, there's good I've seen God do great things on social media. We've seen suicides canceled and stopped Yeah. Day of because of videos and social media.

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So there's great things that God can do with it. But, man, it's it's not a healthy thing. Yeah. And and you can speak on that with authority. Right?

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Because, like Uh-huh. You're someone who somewhat reluctantly has a big following. It's like a funny paradox. It's like I'm here, and I don't know why, and it just grows. And I've I've heard you say in other places that it feels like a a unique anointing, and I would agree with that.

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But Mhmm. It's like my parents being called to, you know, the red light district in Amsterdam in the eighties. They didn't want to be in this place of prostitution that was destroying lives, but they felt at that season, in that time, God was calling them there to rescue people. And when that time was over, they were out. Like and my dad famously tells stories of, you know, our apartment was in the center of Amsterdam, and where they did their Bible study was at one point in the city, and the most direct route was right through the Red Light District.

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That was the most direct route, but he made a decision that if I'm not doing ministry there, I'm not walking through there. And if you don't know anything about the Red Light District, it's, like, famous for women behind glass, and they, like, are selling themselves, and men are walking up like they're picking out cattle, and it's it's awful. And it's what Amsterdam is famous for. And he would walk around lot less efficient, lot more time, you know, time consuming. There were a lot of men in that time in ministry who would laugh at him and what's wrong with you?

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We're in ministry. What's the problem? A lot of those men fell and and end up visiting prostitutes. And so there is a little bit of that duality, right, where you're like, man, I I wanna reach people here, but the destruction it's causing is awful. And if Yes.

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God, if there's any other way and please let me just do what I gotta do and get out of here. It's a little bit of that tension I can feel. For sure. For sure. Yeah.

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Hey. So I think this would be a good way to end. I I think there are people listening, as you said, like a church who, if you ask them that question, would raise their hands. And Mhmm. There are limits to a podcast.

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There are limits to what can happen, but someone's gonna be in their car, in their kitchen. Yep. And they're just they're listening to this with the whole time just shaken by this topic Mhmm. Whether it's them or someone in their lives. Could you speak to that person the way you might speak if you're ending a church service?

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And and then I think we should we could pray over those people and and maybe just end like that. Yeah. Man, if that's you, if you're struggling with suicidal thoughts or anxiety or depression, I've been there. I've been there a few times. And I remember one time when I was in in high school and I was dealing with those thoughts on a daily basis.

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I was thinking of ways to end my life. And just a month later, my dad came home from a men's bible study and like, when it was really heavy in my life, it was I was in rock bottom as a teenager just hiding all my sin and pain from my parents. My dad comes home from a men's bible study, and I see light inside of him. And the darkness in me wanted to run and flee, but I I came to my dad and I was like, dad, what is inside of you? What is this?

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This is new. And he told me that he got delivered and set free at this men's bible study. So I asked my dad to take me the next week, and he took me and my brother. And at this men's Bible study, I met the real Jesus, real tangible Jesus. And he delivered me from the self hatred I was experiencing, the insomnia that I had, the anxiety, the rage.

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I was such an angry person. I was just a mess and God set me free. He set me free. He filled me with his holy spirit and I've never been the same ever since. And that same Jesus that ran after me when I needed him the most, he is running after you, and he can set you free.

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He's able to set you free. He wants to set you free more than you wanna be free. He wants you to be free, and he can do it. Jesus says, it says in the Bible, whoever calls in the name of the Lord will be saved. That word saved, it's in the Greek.

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It means sozo to be saved, healed, and delivered, to be made safe, to be preserved. God wants to save you from the inside out. He doesn't wanna just give you a ticket to heaven. He wants to heal you. He wants to restore you.

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He wants to make you whole. He wants to make you new again, and he can do that when you call on Jesus' name. So if you've been struggling with those thoughts, God hears you. He's not mad at you. He's not disappointed in you.

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He's madly in love with you, and he can rescue you from those thoughts, from that anxiety, from that self hatred. He forgives you and he loves you. He doesn't hate you and he doesn't want to punish you. He wants to heal your soul. So if you've been having those thoughts, if you have a date plan where you want to end it, cancel those plans.

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God has so much more life for you. He has so much more of a purpose for you. And I just want to pray for you right now. So if that's you, I want to pray for you. But before we do just confess this to Jesus.

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Jesus hears you. Just say, Jesus, I wanna live. I don't wanna die. I wanna live. I want freedom.

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Just say that right now. Jesus, I just pray for every person that's listening to this or watching this. God, I pray that you would come to them right now in their brokenness, in their pain, in their sorrow. Jesus, I thank you that the Bible says you are a man of many sorrows, acquainted with grief. You're acquainted with our sorrows.

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You're acquainted with our grief. You know what we've been going through. You know our pain. You see it. And I thank you that you carry it, Jesus.

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You carried the cross. You didn't just carry our sin on the cross. You carried our our sick souls, our hurting and suffering souls. And Lord, I thank you that you offer freedom. You offer healing to us when we call on your name.

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So we do right now. We ask you God that you would come and comfort us, come and restore us, come and deliver us from these thoughts of of of ending it, from these thoughts of hurting ourselves and hating ourselves. That doesn't come from you, God. So, Lord, I pray that you would deliver us from those thoughts. God, I pray that you would protect us and preserve us and save us right now from the inside out.

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And I pray, God, for anyone lonely here who has no sense of family or community. God, the Bible says that you put the lonely in families. I pray that you would do that for those listening to this and watching this. If they've been lonely, if they've been isolated, if they've been struggling because they have no one to talk to, I pray right now, god, that you would bring them to people. Bring them to a church.

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Bring them to a community. Bring them to the right counselor, therapist, or pastor, or friend, or that they would find the help that they need, that they would find that community, lord. I thank you that you're here for us, and you love us. And I thank you, God, that you're able to break the power of suicide, anxiety, and depression in the mighty name of Jesus. We believe that right now for everyone listening to this.

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Yes. In your name, we pray. Thank you, Lord. Amen. Thank you for listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast.

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If you enjoy this content, consider leaving us a rating and a review on iTunes. Got Got questions for the guys? Send them to provokeandexpirestiger dot org. Thanks for listening.

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