Jill Heatwole from Pittsville, Maryland submitted this recipe for the Simply in Season cookbook.

Sesame Chicken Couscous Salad

Mr. Monk was an incomplete man. There were huge holes in his life around which he needed to circumnavigate. While others were into sports, such pastimes completely passed him by. Much of what drove the ordinary people with whom he came in contact was completely absent in Mr. Monk. His character was written and performed in such a way that he came across as a lovable yet mysterious person. It was easy to forgive his foibles and missteps because he had a savant’s ability to peer into corners of life that were dark to everyone else.

I attended a Hollywood event in which both “Monk” and Third Way Media’s television documentary Shadow Voices were being honored for their positive portrayal of mental disorders in the media. David Hoberman, the co-creator and executive producer of “Monk” was being awarded a Career Achievement Award by the federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. In the short remarks after receiving the award, Mr. Hoberman spoke of dealing with his own experience with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He managed to find humor and affection within the experience.

But for those living every day of their lives with this common disorder, it is no “Monk” experience. Rather, it can be debilitating and highly disruptive. Living with someone severely afflicted can be exasperating. According to the National Institute for Health, symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder may include:

1. Excessive devotion to work
2. A feeling of urgency about their actions
3. Expressing anger indirectly, resulting in anxiety or frustration
4. Hording objects of insignificant value
5. Rigidness
6. Lack of generosity
7. Not wanting to allow others to do things
8. Unwilling to show affection
9. Preoccupation with details, rules and lists

From this list, you can deduce that many who go places in life may suffer from some of these behaviors. In my experience, people who become managers and business owners may exhibit more than one or two such behaviors. A touch of obsessive compulsive behavior may focus the mind in unique ways. But when the symptoms become severe life starts to unravel. Relationships dissolve. Normal functioning becomes impossible.

It’s important to recognize these behaviors. Doing so can help us realize that someone we thought was just being stubborn or aloof or a workaholic is doing so not by choice but as a result of their malady. Our judgments of such persons should take into account the difficulty of living with such a disorder.

After all, God COULD have created all of us without Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. But the great giver of life chose not to. It is up to us to embrace and walk with those who think different thoughts than we do.

The biggest crisis of functioning came at age 21, while she was in college. Family friends were able to provide special care while her parents were oversees. Debbie’s younger brother helped her cope when she couldn’t get through each day. Her mind felt stuck, becoming locked in situations, such as repeatedly putting food away after a meal, feeling that the sequence of mustard before ketchup was “wrong” and vice versa. Her brother literally stood by her side saying, “The order they are put away doesn’t matter. Let’s go for a walk.”

As an adult, she still struggles and has found some churches and work situations to be more accommodating than others. She tries to practice good self-care and stress reduction, both of which help her deal with OCD. Her story will be an inspiration to anyone—or a family member—living with OCD, and to friends and churches who want to know how to help.

BURTON: I’m Burton Buller on Shaping Families. You were hearing from Debbie, a woman who struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. We’ll hear from her about what it is like to deal with OCD on a daily basis.

MELODIE: And I’m Melodie Davis. May is mental health awareness month, so most of this month we’re sharing stories of persons dealing with different aspects of mental illness.

BURTON: Debbie is an accomplished musician with a degree in music pedagogy. When I interviewed her for our documentary, Shadow Voices: Finding Hope in Mental Illness, she was eager to share her story, knowing that it could help others. Yet, with an ongoing illness and in trying to live her day-to-day life, it was hard to know what to disclose and what to keep private. So we appreciate her vulnerability.

MELODIE: Debbie grew up in an extremely religious home, as a child of mission workers in Africa. Even as a child, she felt different and sad.

DEBBIE: When I was about 12 then, I would wake my parents up at night, or before I went to bed, I’d tell my mom, this just isn’t working. I’ve been baptized, so I’m supposed to be doing X, Y or Z, and I’m not doing X, Y or Z, and it would be some little picky thing about, you know, I didn’t say the right thing to the right person, therefore, I’m a total failure.

Everything I touch becomes part of my obsessive compulsive pattern. And that includes music. When I was a senior in high school I was doing very well with piano all along, and I would ritualistically play scales over and over again. And they had to be perfect. And there was a lot of emphasis on scales and technique. But I’d start up the scale, and it wouldn’t be just right, and I’d play it over again, and I had it in my mind I had to play it at least five times, PERFECTLY, in a row, but if one time was wrong, I had to start all over again, and other times it would be ten times in a row. I was in such a terrible place, and I was going through so many rituals it was at that point that my brother and sister went to my mom and said, this isn’t right, Mom.

BURTON: By the end of her junior year of college, she was not functioning.

DEBBIE: Some other friends of our family, known us since my parents were young, knew that I was just not functioning at all. They took me to a camp, where they were the youth pastors in western Pennsylvania, with their family. And there I didn’t feel as hindered about these things I thought I was supposed to blurt out. I would go to the altar all the time when there was a call, and I would bang my fist against the altar and I’d say, “I’m going to be a Christian forever, I promise, I’m going to praise God and believe in him, and worship him, and serve him.” But I’d be banging my thumb, you know my thumb would get bruised, and so one evening, the two evangelists and then the couple that was friends with me and their son, we went in, and prayed together.  Something was released. Some, change started to occur. And they really took care of me, because I really was sick at that point. They just allowed me to be sick and start getting better.

BURTON: A psychiatrist finally named her compulsion.

DEBBIE: She said, well, you know there’s a name for what you’re experiencing, it’s called obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD. There’s a million different ways it can manifest itself, and I don’t necessarily deal with my OCD the same way some other people do, but it gave me a handle on how to look for help.

Professional relationships are very difficult for me. Friendships are still a struggle for me. I tend to say things that somebody else might just think and not say and the anxiety that I deal with becomes so heightened so I have friendships now, but relationships are still a struggle.

BURTON: Debbie has worked in data processing and struggles with relating appropriately.

DEBBIE: I am at a work place now that fortunately is very humane. And so it’s easy to be more laid back, and relaxed. It’s important for me to have some kind of way to check reality. Because I might think that what I’ve said to somebody is just my passing comment of how I feel, and I might not mean it judgmentally. I say things that I don’t really realize are a problem. And then, I find out later that they are a huge problem.  

So, one good thing for me is to have somebody to sound some of these things off on, and get a perspective of reality from another person’s opinion.

BURTON: I asked Debbie if she feels stigma.

DEBBIE: I can recently say that I’ve become more in touch with stigma, beyond just the level of well this person has OCD, or whatever. Obviously I tend to attract friends who are understanding, but every disorder, every diagnosis or condition is different. So, somebody may be very familiar with some condition that has been part of their life, or family. They may have a very good understanding of that. They may look at me in general then, very open mindedly, because they know I struggle with something. I find a lot of people who are generally accepting. To really understand how it affects me more specifically, I think that’s harder.

BURTON: At the point we interviewed Debbie, she deeply appreciated the understanding of her congregation and pastor.

DEBBIE: It’s allowed me to have more people relationships over a longer period of time than I have had before, and more intimately. Most of those have been for the better. Some situations have been seemingly for the worse, temporarily, but that’s still part of adjusting to real life as a missionary’s kid. Realize, well, I’m not going to go to a different church just because this happened. You know, I’m still here, and they’re still here, and I’ll find out how to get through this, and that’ll be a lesson for me that I’ve not learned before.

BURTON: What does Debbie want people to know about OCD?

DEBBIE: It’s good to be open-minded, not just like I said about what the label or the diagnosis is, but to minimize as much as possible preconceived thoughts about what the person’s strengths or weaknesses would be, and allow the person to express their own sense of what’s helpful, what’s not, what’s a struggle, what’s not.

BURTON: Debbie had several other suggestions for churches.

DEBBIE: I think it is great for people to simply be available. Some people feel like they can’t be of help, they’re not worthy of helping, because they don’t have a psychology degree, or they’re not a therapist or whatever. And, I don’t think that the fact somebody doesn’t have those qualifications makes a difference in the church. That’s not what makes the church up. I think people in congregations sell themselves short of how much of an impact they’re able to have.

BURTON: Debbie talked about one friend who helps just by letting Debbie come over.

DEBBIE: Joy is a person whom I’ve gone to when I just needed somewhere to go. I didn’t feel safe being by myself at home, but I didn’t necessarily need to spill all my guts of what was going on. I just needed to be there. And, you know she might… there are times, like one time I went over and she showed me they had been making little favors for their daughter’s wedding reception or something. And she showed me all these little favors that her husband was making. And we talked a lot about that sort of thing, and we didn’t talk a lot about me. But I was there instead of home alone. So the fact that Joy is not a therapist by training didn’t matter.

BURTON: We are grateful to Debbie for sharing her story and insights. You can learn more details of her story at the website for the Shadow Voices documentary, available from links at ShapingFamilies.com

And now we’ll change gears a bit and check in with Sam Heatwole for some thoughts and stories from Frog Hollow.

SAM:Some days when I turn down the Frog Hollow road, there’s a feeling of slowing down, a break with the primal screams of tormented technology, a return to the quiet sounds of nature. An old friend of ours who ran a restaurant in town before he went blind used to complain about the noise levels at our place. “How can you stand the quiet?” he asked. He loved to visit, but was always glad to get back to the familiar roar of the city. “People noise,” he called it. Why does he prefer the city? Beats me. Maybe there’s a sense of security in all the humanity living right next door. Maybe it’s the vitality of shared experiences, even a mutuality of anxieties, like how we love to hate a hardwinter together.

The night life in Frog Hollow is stimulating, but in a different way: a chorus of restless, rattling leaves backed by an orchestra of crickets; the muffled thunder of a metal roof in a gust of wind; owls coaxing field mice out of their nests. The country is never quiet. Instead of night traffic and a siren’s wail, we have the sharp bark of a fox. And the conspiratorial chirrup of raccoons.

About an hour before dawn, Ivy Moyers’ rooster kick-starts the day. A cardinal begins the ritual greeting of the morning as first one, then another and finally a chorus of birds link their song with his. Later the “people noise” joins in. Carl Bonner jounces by on his John Deere tractor. Mrs. Moyers’ field gate squeaks as she goes through to her chicken house with the feed pail. David Reedy, Jr. puts another piece of aluminum siding on his house, and the ring of his hammer echoes doubly from the facing hillsides of the hollow.

We need each other. People who are exploring the reality of God need each other. The light on the hill is a city, a congregation of lights, not simply a lone candle. We learn from each other, from our mistakes as well as from our discoveries. We need all the help we can get maturing into the image of God. Studying life together is a unique function of the gathering of God’s people, and we’re not going to grow as quickly without the concentration of experience we meet in each other. Not all the people of Frog Hollow were members of a congregation of “awakening ones,” but those who most influenced our lives were. Quietly and unmistakably, they demonstrated the reality of God in their own lives. Of course, we saw human frailty, too. But most often then we saw remorse and repentance—great words, great experiences in themselves—followed by forgiveness and new growth. Integrity is powerful stuff, particularly as it rises out of the ashes of regret and failure.  

BURTON: Thank you very much, Sam. You’ll find more from Frog Hollow at our website, as well as links to purchase the book, Frog Hollow Journal by Jim Fairfield. That’s at ShapingFamilies.com. You can also sign up there for our free weekly email update, find and share podcasts of our program, read my blog, get a new recipe each week, and download a study guide for a group. We want this program to serve the needs of families. You can help us by sending us your ideas, tips, comments and gifts.

MELODIE: In recognition of mental health awareness month, we have a free pamphlet we can send you on our topic today. It’s called “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: When Unwanted Thoughts Take Over,” and it’s provided by the National Institute of Mental Health. You can request it on our website under “current offer” at Shaping Families.com.

BURTON: Or you can call us at 800-245-7894 from 8-4:30 Monday through Friday Eastern Time. That number again is 800-245-7894. Andnext week we’ll hear from a man who donated his kidney to a complete stranger.  Until then, this is Burton Buller . . .

MELODIE: . . . and Melodie Davis reminding you of Debbie’s story about her friend, Joy, who helped—just by offering a place to hang out. Maybe you can do that for someone, too. Shaping Families is a production of MennoMedia on behalf of the Mennonite churches.

The night life in Frog Hollow is stimulating, but in a different way: a chorus of restless, rattling leaves backed by an orchestra of crickets; the muffled thunder of a metal roof in a gust of wind; owls coaxing field mice out of their nests. The country is never quiet. Instead of night traffic and a siren’s wail, we have the sharp bark of a fox. And the conspiratorial chirrup of raccoons.

About an hour before dawn, Ivy Moyers’ rooster kick-starts the day. A cardinal begins the ritual greeting of the morning as first one, then another and finally a chorus of birds link their song with his. Later the “people noise” joins in. Carl Bonner jounces by on his John Deere tractor. Mrs. Moyers’ field gate squeaks as she goes through to her chicken house with the feed pail. David Reedy, Jr. puts another piece of aluminum siding on his house, and the ring of his hammer echoes doubly from the facing hillsides of the hollow.

We need each other. People who are exploring the reality of God need each other. The light on the hill is a city, a congregation of lights, not simply a lone candle. We learn from each other, from our mistakes as well as from our discoveries. We need all the help we can get maturing into the image of God. Studying life together is a unique function of the gathering of God’s people, and we’re not going to grow as quickly without the concentration of experience we meet in each other. Not all the people of Frog Hollow were members of a congregation of “awakening ones,” but those who most influenced our lives were. Quietly and unmistakably, they demonstrated the reality of God in their own lives. Of course, we saw human frailty, too. But most often then we saw remorse and repentance—great words, great experiences in themselves—followed by forgiveness and new growth. Integrity is powerful stuff, particularly as it rises out of the ashes of regret and failure.  

Request this item by filling out the form below or send your request by regular mail addressed to Shaping Families, Box 22, Harrisonburg, VA 22803. One copy is free. Quantities available for just $1.00 each for group use. Call 800-245-7894 to order more than one.

Dr. Sherry Davis Molock is both a pastor and a professor in psychology, which very helpfully combines two fields that sometimes seem at odds with each other. She is associate professor of psychology at George Washington University, Washington, D.C. In addition to her work in academia, Dr. Molock is also co-pastor of The Beloved Community Church in Accokeek, Maryland. She is also on the board of NOPCAS, the National Organization for People of Color Against Suicide.

She received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to support her research on suicidal behaviors among African American adolescents. She has published articles on suicide in The Journal of Black Psychology.  This program continues our May “Mental Illness Awareness” month.

BURTON: May is mental health month and here on Shaping Families we’re featuring a series of guests speaking about mental illness from the perspective of Christian faith. I’m Burton Buller.

MELODIE: And I’m Melodie Davis. The opening comment you heard was from Dr. Sherry Davis Molock, Associate Professor of Psychology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Molock is also co-pastor of The Beloved Community Church in Accokeek, Maryland. So she offers both spiritual and psychological insights and information.

BURTON: Dr. Molock brought this helpful perspective to a documentary we produced earlier, Fierce Goodbye: Living in the Shadow of Suicide. Andas a parent of three children herself, she also brings some practical family understanding. We asked Dr. Molock what happens when a person in a family is going through depression.

SHERRY: Depression really is a family illness. Part of that is because depression does tend to be—I don’t like to use the word hereditary because we think it means fate; if its hereditary I’m going to get it—but we do know that depression runs in families, so what it probably means is there’s a bio-chemical imbalance in your brain, and there’s a genetic predisposition. So some people in the family are going to be prone to depression. And, unfortunately, our science is not exact enough to know which people but we do know that people who have more stress in their daily lives are gonna be more susceptible to that. But we also know there will be other people in the family who are just more constitutionally resilient and will be able to handle those stresses differently.

Basically, the family has to gear itself around the fact that you have a person who has a chronic illness and that means that while the person may have long periods of remission, you have to constantly be looking out for signs that the depression is reappearing, particularly when people go off their medication. But when people are depressed, they don’t make good decisions, their thinking and their life slows down quite a bit, so they also don’t have good problem-solving skills. That might mean as a family member you will have to take over some of the functions and the roles of that person. 

If you are a parent, for example, you may love your children, but you feel so horrible you can’t focus on your children. It’s not that you don’t care about them, but you don’t care about yourself. You don’t think you’re a good mother or a good father anyway. You may not be able to function at your job. You may actually be fired because your employer doesn’t understand that you have a chronic mental illness and you’re ashamed so you haven’t told them that, so you don’t get disability, or you don’t get the help that you need on your job to help you with those kind of conditions. So it may present a financial crisis for the family. It presents a spiritual crisis for the family. 

BURTON: What are some of the spiritual struggles?

SHERRY: Many people go to healing ceremonies, go to church and say “I’ve laid myself before the altar and I’ve asked God to heal me, and God, why haven’t you done it?” So that presents a faith crisis. We don’t always understand exactly why some of us are healed instantly and some are not. The passage in the Bible that talks of that about by Jesus’ stripes we are healed, the Bible doesn’t say how long that takes. We assume it’s instantaneous. But there are examples of instantaneous healings, there are also examples of healings that take years, and there are also examples—Paul talks about the thorn in his side—that never happened. And so we also have to learn to appreciate that healing comes in different forms and that you can still have joy in the context of a chronic condition. 

BURTON: How does a family live with this kind of situation?

SHERRY: With my families that I work with, for example, I say you’ve got to learn to celebrate small victories, things like our goal is to minimize the number of hospitalizations you have in a year. That’s a victory. Instead of going five times this year, you only went once. That’s a major victory as opposed to looking at that as a setback. We might say with a young person, you were able to take what we call a medication holiday during the summer and you did really well with that. Does that mean you should never take it again? No, it means that now that school is starting back and you’re gonna have more stress in your life, it’s now time to go back on the medication.

We need to stop looking at medication as a sign of weakness. Medication can be a gift from God, another angel, if you will, that will help you with the biochemical imbalance which is not your fault. Parents can’t feel guilty about, oh my mother had depression and I have depression, I’ve given it to my child. That’s just one of those things that happen. God doesn’t promise us that everything will be rosy. God does promise that God will be there for us. 

BURTON: Dr. Molock told us that suicide rates were historically lower among African Americans, but those rates began to change in the 1980s. We asked why.

SHERRY: There’s not a lot of research on this, I want to stress that. These are just my thoughts about this. I think that prior to the Civil Rights Movement one of the sort of bi-products of living in segregated communities was that most of the resources that were available to the black community were in the community. So, for example, the presence of positive role models were in the community. I know when I was growing up as a child, people from all walks of life literally lived in my block, so that there was a milk man next door, a mechanic across the street, a college professor—and so inadvertently, although the Civil Rights Movement gave us tremendous rights and a lot of economic gain came from that community, that movement, the downside of that was that all those resources dispersed. When people move out into the suburbs, that means that the parts of your families, the family members that are more upwardly mobile, they move out with all their resources. The economic base in the community also moves out. So all of that rich resource, the the kinship ties, the support system, even some of the churches moved from the city to the suburbs, all of that stability and all those rich resources also went. Not completely, but certainly decreased quite a bit. So my perception of that increase, because if you look at the timing of the increase, is right after the height of the movement. It’s in the 80’s that you see this dramatic increase in the rise of suicides. Also when you create a situation where people become more hopeful about advancement and then still meet discrimination and barriers, that I think creates greater despair, but is at least unfortunately when people are oppressed all across the board, unfortunately people’s expectations are also fairly low. 

BURTON: What does the science of human psychology have to offer the church—and the faith community?

SHERRY: I want pastors in particular to give people in their church permission to come to them and mental health resources to get the help that they need. And it’s important to do workshops, but it’s even more important to say it from the pulpit. The average person is not going to come to a workshop unless they’ve been directly affected by depression or suicide. But the entire congregation needs to know, what does it mean to be depressed. They need to know that being depressed is a mental illness; it is not a sign of lack of faith. It is not demon possession; it is not a sign that you are cursed by God.

Even the Bible has lots of examples; most of the major prophets were depressed. Moses, in the book of Numbers, at some point gets so overwhelmed by trying to help all the people, you know, he says to God, why don’t you just kill me? I can’t handle this. And then God sends him an angel through his father-in-law Jethro who says son, you can’t solve all the problems of all the people in our communities. Let’s set up a council basically of elders. So again, how did God work? God could have just zapped the depression away, but God worked through people. That’s another way that the church can help. We need to let Jesus’ light shine in us. 

BURTON: What can loved ones do when they’re living with someone who is seriously depressed?  

SHERRY: It’s really important for family members to monitor the loved one, not to be, you know hovering over them, but you have to monitor them relatively closely. You have to be the person that looks out for signs that depression or bipolar disorder is coming back, ‘cause they may not realize it. You have to be the one that kind of pays attention to, are they starting to become less interested in their daily activities? Are they sleeping a lot? Are they eating a lot, or have they lost their appetite? Are they an insomniac now, they can’t go to sleep, or they fall asleep and wake up early in the morning, all of those things because they may not notice it, or they may know it but be scared to tell you. So you have to pay attention to that. 

BURTON: One of Sherry’s concerns in focusing on mental illness has been preventing suicide in any community or family. She shared some basic risk factors to be aware of if you are concerned someone with mental illness is considering suicide.

SHERRY: One obvious one is depression. People stop coming to church who used to be very faithfully involved in the church community. People isolating themselves more, problems with eating or sleeping; these are all signs of depression.

Sometimes a person has been depressed for a while and then they suddenly look happy and you think oh, well, they’re out of their crisis. Sometimes they’ve made a decision to complete suicide and they feel relieved about their decision and so that’s why. So you need to ask if they seem to be suddenly joyful ”oh you seem to be in much better spirits; I wonder, can you tell me a little bit more about you know what has given you that joy?” Asking people directly about suicide again is not a problem, that you’re not putting or planting the idea in their mind, but you’re really giving them permission to talk about it is really important.

Oh, people giving away prized possessions, people writing notes saying, you know you’ve meant a lot to me, I love you so much, and kind of in a way it’s okay for people to say oh you mean a lot to me, but in a way that’s sort of again is in the context of being depressed. I just want you to know, Joe, that you’ve always meant a lot to me and I’m really gonna miss you. Talking about going away. Talking about things like oh, I won’t have worry about those problems in my marriage or my job anymore. People who have lost a parent or a loved one who don’t seem to be able to be coping effectively with that over a certain period of time, those are all risk factors. 

BURTON: We thank Dr. Sherry Davis Molock for being with us today, and for giving this very helpful list of signs of depression which we’ll post at our website. I hope you’ll go there and maybe print it so you can be aware of these kinds of warning signs. And now we’ll turn our attention to our Shaping Families’ counselor, Harvey Yoder who also brings much experience to this topic. Harvey?

HARVEY: I remember as a child going on a mountain hike one hot summer day with some of my older siblings and their friends. It didn't take long for me to get so tired I began to lag behind the rest. And the further behind I got, the more exhausted and terrible I felt, yet I didn’t want to admit I needed help.

Finally, someone noticed and suggested the group pause to let me catch up. Then that kind person took my hand and walked with me for the rest of the climb. I can’t even remember who it was, but I’ll never forget how much better it made me feel. Even though we continued to move at a good pace, I actually experienced a new physical as well as emotional energy to reach the top with the rest. A little help and a little hope go a long way.

I sometimes ask my clients to rate their emotional state on a scale of 0-10, a ten meaning they feel euphoric or ecstatic (something we rarely experience), zero meaning they are suicidally depressed (which most of us, thankfully, also rarely experience), and five feeling just average or so-so, neither really bad nor especially good. Distressed clients often report a mood range of about 2-4, as compared to a wished for 6-8. 

A key factor, I believe, in maintaining positive emotional energy is to restore a greater sense of hope. No matter how bad things are in the present, or have been in the past, if we can borrow—from the good Bank of Hope—some evidence-based belief that things will get better, then we will be able, with God’s help and the help of other good people, to feel and to function better, and to keep up the fight. The Bible actually defines faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not (yet) seen.”

It is this kernel of faith, even if it’s only the size of a grain of mustard seed, that I want to help clients build on to better deal with the mountains of distress they face, and to either to have those mountains removed, or to be able to find a way around or over them.

In drug trials that are done for testing the effects of antidepressants, there is always a control group that is given a placebo, a so called sugar pill. Amazingly, that group often experiences nearly as much relief from depression as do the ones actually taking the drug. This isn’t just because they trick themselves into believing they are less depressed, but because the very hope of getting better releases good endorphins in their brains, a natural drug, if you please, that makes a real difference in their well-being. 

A helpful web site I discovered recently for individuals dealing with mental illness is called, appropriately, “mental hope.” (http://mentalhope.wordpress.com/) You can also find the link on the Shaping Families website.

BURTON: Thank you so much, Harvey. You can find Harvey Yoder’s comments, links to the Family Life Resource Center where he works, his regular blog, and other resources at our website, ShapingFamilies.com.

MELODIE: You’ll also find Burton’s blog, a free recipe, the podcast and a study guide. I hope you’ll check it out.

BURTON: We’d also love to send you a helpful free pamphlet called Dealing with Depression, which is written from a Christian perspective. Go to our website and click on “Current Offer.” Or call 800-245-7894. That’s ShapingFamilies.com, or the phone again is 800-245-7894. If you call Monday through Friday from 8-4:30 Eastern Time you can talk directly to our customer service people. Let them know you heard about this on Shaping Families and mention the call letters of your radio station.

MELODIE: Next week we’ll be sharing the story of a woman who deals with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Sometimes people make jokes about OCD, but it is not a laughing matter. Join us to get inside this difficult condition.

BURTON: Until then, this is Burton Buller and Melodie Davis reminding you of Dr. Molock’s beautiful words today: “God doesn’t promise that everything will be rosy. God does promise to be there for us.”

MELODIE: Shaping Families is produced on behalf of Mennonite churches by MennoMedia.

Request this item by filling out the form below or send your request by regular mail addressed to Shaping Families, Box 22, Harrisonburg, VA 22803. Quantities available for just $1.00 each for group use. Call 800-245-7894 to order more than one.