08/05/2026
Depression is a skilled liar because it speaks in your own voice.
Tonight, Perez Hilton appeared on a livestream in what authorities described as a possible act of self-harm.
Viewers called for help, as deputies went to his Miami home and chose distance and communication rather than forcing a confrontation. The situation remains unsettled. Months earlier, Hilton had survived severe sepsis and a twenty-one-day hospitalization. He later spoke publicly about finding God, regretting people he had hurt and wanting to live differently.
Then the internet gathered around his pain. Reading comments on X…some watched with concern, while others mocked. Whatever anyone thinks of Perez Hilton, Christian conviction must become flesh here. The wounded man on the screen is still a man beneath the gaze of the God who knows every room of the human heart.
I know something about rooms like that. Depression found me when I was a teenager. Sometimes it came quietly and changed the temperature of everything. A familiar room could feel airless. Morning light slipped through the blinds, announcing another day I had no desire to carry. Words reached my ears without reaching the place where I lived. I learned how to appear present.
Here's what you need to know about mental illness. Sometimes a face can sit at a table while the mind retreats somewhere cold. A young man can laugh at the proper moment while a second voice speaks beneath every conversation. It knew my failures and repeated them with the patience of dripping water. It could take one awkward moment, one disappointment, one private shame and turn it beneath a harsh light until it explained my entire existence. The darkness followed me into daylight.
Years later, after Christ saved me and called me to ministry, I discovered that Christians can speak carelessly about illnesses they cannot see. We would never tell a diabetic to throw away insulin or shame a man for allowing a surgeon to remove a tumor. Yet when suffering touches the brain, some believers reach for suspicion before compassion.
The brain belongs to the body and when the body is affected, thought and behavior may change. Fatigue, disease, injury, inherited conditions and hormonal changes can disturb the mind. Human beings are embodied souls. Our spiritual lives never float above flesh and blood.
Elijah stood on Carmel with courage fierce enough to face a nation. Soon afterward, he collapsed beneath a tree and asked to die. God began with sleep, food, water and time. The Lord cared for the body carrying the burden.
Job's friends chose a harsher path. They stared at suffering and built an accusation. Hidden sin must explain the ashes, the sores, the grief, the silence. Their confidence became another wound. God later exposed the poverty of their verdict.
Psalm 88 gives us language for a night that does not end before the final verse. The writer prays, questions and closes with darkness still near. Scripture does not erase the page because relief failed to arrive on schedule. God preserved that prayer for every believer who has whispered into a ceiling and heard his own breathing.
Mental suffering may rise from many places…illness can alter thought, trauma can lodge fear in the nervous system. Grief can drain color from the world. Exhaustion can bend judgment. Sin can harden into misery. Spiritual warfare is real. Some anguish hides behind a curtain only God can draw back.
A wise Chrisitian approaches that mystery on his knees. Correct diagnosis requires humility. I once knew of a woman whose depression improved through medication until a Christian persuaded her that taking it betrayed trust in God. She stopped, deteriorated and died by su***de. I blame reckless counsel that treated medicine as God's rival rather than a gift of common grace.
Medication cannot forgive sin. A sermon cannot correct every disordered process in the brain. Counseling cannot raise the dead. Each gift has a proper reach. Physicians treat the body. Counselors untangle thought, trauma and behavior. Pastors bring Scripture, prayer and the care of Christ's people. Wisdom lets them work in the same room!
The church should become the safest room in town for people whose minds have become frightening places to live.
Compassion preserves moral responsibility. Mental illness cannot become a blanket excuse for cruelty, violence, manipulation or sin. Scripture speaks honestly because guilt is real. The same Bible warns us against assigning guilt where God has not. Christ's disciples once saw a man born blind and demanded a culprit. Jesus refused their narrow choices.
Christians must learn the courage of saying, "I do not know." This is where Jesus Christ becomes more than a comforting idea.
He came near enough to be touched. The Son of God entered a body with nerves that felt pain, lungs that gasped, eyes that wept and a heart crushed with sorrow. He sat beside the ashamed. He moved toward people everyone else avoided. In Gethsemane, anguish pressed upon Him until His sweat fell like blood. At Calvary, the hands that formed the human mind were pierced for minds filled with pride, lust, hatred, terror and confusion.
He carried real guilt beneath real judgment. Every secret thought, selfish wound, lie and act we cannot repair was laid upon Christ. The cross was an ex*****on, a substitution, the holy Son standing where sinners deserved to stand. He drank the cup of wrath to its bitter floor.
Then death lost its prisoner, as Jesus rose bodily from the grave. His resurrection declares that sin can be forgiven, shame can lose its claim and death will not keep the final word. Christ calls us to turn from sin and entrust ourselves wholly to Him. He does not wait at a safe distance for wounded people to make themselves presentable.
Come trembling. Come from the therapist's office, the hospital corridor, the locked bedroom or even the bathroom floor. Bring the thoughts you fear to speak aloud and the sins you cannot excuse. Bring the mind that has turned against you. Christ receives sinners because His cross is sufficient, never because their hands are steady.
Conversion may lift some darkness quickly. Other wounds heal through years of care and some remain until resurrection. Salvation rests upon Christ's finished work rather than the stability of our emotions. A believer may love Jesus and still need medication. Grace holds when the mind cannot hold itself.
Tonight, somewhere in Miami, a family waits near a closed door. Across America, countless others are doing the same. A mother listens for movement in the next room. A pastor hides his prescription before walking into the pulpit. A teenager watches morning gather at the window and wonders how he will survive another day. The church must refuse to stand at the glass and stare.
We move toward suffering with truth, humility, practical care and the gospel. We protect life. We confess sin. We seek wise help. We stay when the room grows quiet.
Christ has already entered the darkness carrying wounds of His own and He knows the way out.
