Early in my walk with the Lord, I was drawn to something I didn’t have a name for. I felt pulled toward prayer, toward intercession, toward standing in the gap for other people, long before I understood what any of that meant or how to actually walk it out. I didn’t have language for it. I didn’t know it had a name, let alone that it was needed in the body of Christ. I just knew something in me leaned that direction, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
What changed everything was a church that made space for me anyway.
They sat with me. They asked questions, not surface questions, but the kind that actually wanted an answer: what moves you, what are you drawn to, what’s stirring in you. It didn’t matter that I was young in the Lord. If anything, that seemed to matter to them in the opposite direction. They saw value in investing in the ones who were still new, still unformed, still asking more questions than they could answer. They gave me language for what I’d been feeling. And then they didn’t just tell me about a prayer group. They invited me into one, and made it clear they didn’t just want me to show up. They saw me as a valuable part of that group, new as I was.
They kept reaching out. They kept encouraging me, teaching me, loving on me, inviting me back. I remember, distinctly, what it felt like to be wanted by my church family. Not tolerated. Not politely included. Wanted.
Years later, I can trace a straight line from that season to where I am now. It’s part of why my marriage is a genuinely good marriage. It shaped the decisions my husband and I made about how to raise our children, how we choose to connect with people, how to have God-breathed community. One church, willing to invest in someone who had nothing to offer yet but a stirring she couldn’t name, and the ripple from that is still moving through my life decades later.
The Mental Health Cost of Never Being Invited In
I sit with people every week who never had that. And what strikes me isn’t that they’re sad, exactly. It’s that they’re unsure of themselves in a very specific way. They question themselves constantly. They can feel that there’s something in them (a gift, a calling, a way of seeing the world, a strength) but they don’t have the confidence to let it out. They want to bloom. They can feel themselves wanting to break out of the shell they’re in. But nobody has ever been close enough, or invested enough, to name what they’re seeing and say keep going, this is real, I see it too.
Scripture says iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens another. That’s not decoration. It’s a description of how growth actually works. It requires contact. It requires someone else close enough, and committed enough, to do the sharpening. Left alone, iron doesn’t sharpen itself. Left alone, a gift you can’t name and haven’t been invited to use tends to stay exactly where it is, sensed, but never developed. That’s what I see in so many of the people who come into my office. Not an absence of gifting. An absence of invitation.
Why This Is a Mental Health Issue, Not Just a Spiritual One
I want to be direct about something, because it would be easy to read all of this as a nice story about church and miss what it actually is: a mental health issue wearing a spiritual coat.
Chronic self-doubt, the kind that follows someone into every room and makes them shrink instead of speak, doesn’t usually come from nowhere. It’s very often the residue of never having had anyone reflect back what was real and good in them, consistently, before they believed it themselves. Self-worth isn’t built in isolation. It’s built relationally, through being seen, named, and included by people who didn’t require proof first. When that never happens, what’s left behind isn’t just low confidence. It’s anxiety about taking up space at all, a nervous system braced for rejection instead of expecting welcome, and a quiet, persistent belief that whatever is stirring inside them probably isn’t worth bringing into the light.
This is why loneliness and isolation show up so reliably in the research on anxiety, depression, and diminished self-esteem, not as a side note, but as one of the more consistent threads running through all three. Belonging isn’t a bonus feature of a healthy life. It’s part of the mechanism that regulates a person’s sense of safety and worth in the first place. A person who has never been invited in has usually also never had the chance to test whether their gift, their voice, or their presence is actually wanted, and without that testing ground, doubt just keeps compounding on itself.
That’s the clinical version of what I lived spiritually. My church didn’t just help my faith. They interrupted a version of me that could have stayed unsure of herself indefinitely, because nobody had yet said, out loud and repeatedly, we see something in you and we want you here. That interruption is mental health work, whether or not it happens inside a session.
Belonging as a Protective Factor
There’s a picture Paul uses for the church: the body, made of many parts, each necessary, none of them optional, none of them ranked by seniority. A hand doesn’t get to say to a newer, less-developed part of the body, I don’t need you yet, come back when you’ve grown into something. The whole body suffers when a part of it is present but never invited to function.
I think that’s true of every community, not just the church, and I think we’ve quietly built a culture, inside and outside our congregations, that runs the opposite way. We wait for people to prove themselves before we invest in them. We wait for confidence to show up before we extend the invitation, when it was always going to be the invitation that produced the confidence, not the other way around. Nobody blooms in isolation while waiting to earn a seat at the table. People bloom because somebody pulled a chair out before they’d done anything to deserve it, and kept pulling it out, week after week, until they believed they belonged there.
That’s what happened to me. I hadn’t proven anything. I was new, unformed, unsure what I was even drawn to. And a group of people who didn’t have to make room for me made room for me anyway, and kept making it, until I grew into what they’d already decided to see in me.
How to Become Someone’s Invitation
I keep asking myself lately who around me is standing exactly where I was standing all those years ago: sensing something in themselves they can’t yet name, unsure if it’s real, unsure if anyone would want them in the room before they’ve figured it out. And I’ve started asking a second question right behind it: am I willing to be the one who invites them in before they’ve earned it?
Not fix them. Not mentor them from a distance. Just notice them, ask them real questions, listen long enough to hear what moves them, and then actually invite them into the group, the project, the ministry, the conversation, and mean it enough to keep inviting them back.
Because here’s what I’ve come to believe, in my own life and in the therapy room both: people rarely need more information about their gifting. They need someone to encourage them while they’re still uncertain. They need someone to rally behind them before the outcome is guaranteed. They need someone willing to cheer them on mid-process, not just congratulate them at the finish line. Encouragement given after someone has already succeeded is nice. Encouragement given while they’re still finding their footing is what actually builds the confidence to keep going.
If you’re reading this and you recognize yourself in the client I described, sensing something in you that you can’t quite name, unsure if you’re allowed to take up that kind of space yet, I want you to hear this plainly: you don’t need to have it figured out before it’s real, and you don’t need to earn an invitation before you’re worth inviting. Let someone close enough to sharpen you. It’s allowed to start messy.
And if you recognize yourself instead as someone with a little more room in your life, a little more steadiness than the person next to you, I’d ask you to look for who’s standing at the edge of the room, sensing something, unsure if anyone sees it. Ask them the real questions. Listen. Give language to what they can’t yet name. Invite them in, and keep inviting them, long after it stops feeling like a novelty to you.
I’ve said it out loud recently, and I keep coming back to it: sometimes all it takes is an invitation for someone to join in. It took one for me. My marriage, my children, the families we’ve walked alongside in foster care and adoption, my friends, my community, all of it traces back to people who invited me before I’d done anything to deserve it.
Somebody is waiting on you to do the same for them.
