Let’s make time and room for those facing mental health challenges

I love the holidays and I strive to keep the spirit of Christmas alive all year.

But the holidays are emotional whirlwinds for many of us; they are seasons filled with difficulty, loss and longing.

During the “routine” months of the year, we have the usual distractions. But from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, the reminders return and we are forced to again confront various ghosts.

As my friend said after her father’s death, it is hard to face “the empty chair.”

Whether we’re separated from our loved ones by geography, death, divorce or other reasons, it seems only human to wish that things were different.

I particularly remember one Christmas before I found my church home.

For most of my adult life, I had spent holidays with my ex-husband’s family, but that year all of those people were gone and I was alone in a new reality.

One Saturday before Christmas, I sat alone in my car, depressed and tearful.

On a whim I called a church I had visited, which led to a conversation with the pastor. The minister was kind: he told me that if I made an appointment with him after New Year’s Day, he believed that he could help me.

“You see,” he told me, “Christmas is our busy season.”

Whether it’s the holiday season or some other time, people may struggle — and we may encounter those in need at the most inconvenient times for us.

I try to imagine how inconvenient it must have been for Mary and Joseph that year when the taxes were due in Bethlehem. I can imagine how inconvenient it must have been to travel by donkey while pregnant and during tax season. The couple must have thought, “What next?” They had no lodgings — and then the baby arrived.

But every day is filled with opportunities as well as inconveniences, and the innkeeper was the much-needed helper who let the holy family use the stable.

The famed English poet Stevie Smith suggested that sometimes we may think a person is waving to us from afar — but that if we look closer, we will see that the person is not waving.

They are drowning.

So no matter the season or how inconvenient the time, watch for the subtle yet universal signs of someone in need of help; of someone who is adrift. We have likely all played both roles: sometimes we’re the ones in need of help — and sometimes we’re the ones able to offer help.

Mental health needs do not have to be stigmatized; they are just as deserving of our attention as needs related to our physical well-being.

Needing help and giving help are cyclical like seasons — and even, as Job 14: 7 tells us, “when a tree is chopped down, there is always the hope that it will sprout again.”

The following Christmas, my children and I were invited to attend a nativity play. We were strangers at that church, but we were treated like beloved guests whose places at the table had been long reserved.

You don’t have to face the empty chair alone.

No matter the season, remember the innkeeper and make a place at the table for someone who may not be waving.

They may be drowning.

C. Renee Love is an English professor at Lander University in Greenwood.

(Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of monthly articles in The State supporting mental health awareness.)