May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and over the next four weeks I want to walk through something I run into often in my coaching and pastoral counseling: unmet dreams that harden into expectations, and the way they can quietly haunt a person until they tip over into self-destructive behavior or real mental health suffering. The only durable solution I have found is to drop the expectations and re-focus our desires on God.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to my belief in God was the reality of suffering. The world seemed filled with wars, disasters, disease, poverty, hate, and cruelty. In the 1970s, it was common for evangelists to stop me on the street asking if I’d heard the “good news.” When they began talking about a loving God who gave His only Son, I could only stare in disbelief.