“I remember looking at my Bible over the years and reading God’s responses to people who feel small and insignificant, as I once did,” claims Jon Drury, Minister of Adults at Redwood Chapel Community Church in Castro Valley, California. “Yet I couldn’t apply them to myself.”

Drury felt like a child against an insurmountable wall of crushing emotions. “My own struggle was so debilitating and took so long to resolve that I began writing about it.” He realized other people might also feel small and could benefit from his experience. And he believed the Lord was encouraging him to communicate this message to a larger audience. Currently Drury is writing a book on the subject, tentatively titled, Lord, I Feel So Small! The Battle for Personal Significance. He mentioned that many ministers and Christian leaders are plagued by the same challenge he’s faced, even though they’ve been to seminary and are steeped in the Word of God.

“How can this happen?” I asked.

One cause, he believes, is that ministers are often trained to remain aloof from their congregations, to befriend only other clergy. He remembers one young minister saying, “Don’t apologize to anyone. Always be strong.”

During a particularly dark time in ministry, while Drury was serving a church in Washington state, he attended a minister’s conference. “I felt like crawling out the back door because I had so little to boast about when it came to the number of church members, baptisms, accomplishments, church growth, and so on. It was not until decades later that I saw things in perspective.”

Drury believes feeling small can stem from one’s childhood. He remembers hearing his parents fight when he was a young boy and assuming his family would break up the next day. “It was excruciating.” Some of this trauma was based on his father’s own difficult boyhood after his mother died giving birth to him and his twin brother. As a result, the boys “were farmed out to another family and not returned home for five years. By then their father had remarried.”

Grief ensnared Drury’s father. “He seldom held a job, made immature, self-centered decisions, and was careless with debt. We went through bankruptcy two or three times,” Jon says about his father.

Because the problem of insecurity encompasses so many areas of one’s emotions and personality, Drury has chosen to grapple individually with situations and challenges that are part of the larger picture. It’s too much to take on all of it at once. In his case, grief was a major issue and he found a useful resource in the Grief Recovery Handbook by John W. James and Frank Cherry.

Drury discovered he had stockpiled grief from various experiences of pain and loss over the years. Many steps were involved in seeking recovery. “First, I had to realize I had a problem”—not an easy thing to do, after having buried his emotions for so long.

Second, Drury looked at the damage incurred by his problem—whether lack of communication with a loved one, denying his feelings, or hiding from others.

Third, “I searched the Scriptures for six months as I looked for God’s solution.”

And fourth, “I was convicted to step into the new truths I had learned and obey them as they applied to my life.”

“I was always a loner,” says Drury. “I grew up believing I couldn’t trust anyone because I never knew who would stick it to me.” Though he put up a good front, he felt unworthy of friendship. When his wife commented one day, “You don’t have any friends,” it brought on a personal crisis that drove him into the Scriptures to study the meaning and importance of having and being a friend.

Jon then reached out to Jack, a man he met at the local gym. His success with Jack led to a Bible study. From there he made other friends and began to see the value of building trustworthy relationships and learning to communicate with a variety of people supporting one another as they offered their gifts and talents for the good of the community. “We cannot find our place in life as loners. People need people,” Drury agrees. “We need the powerful bonds of love that are available through brothers and sisters in Christ.”

Another example of change and healing occurred one day while Drury was driving home after visiting an elderly couple. He stopped the car and wrote down exactly how he was feeling about himself. “You’re a failure.” “You’re a loser.” “You have no useful gifts.” “You don’t measure up to others.” Then he compared what he was feeling to what God says about his people.

He calls us friend (John 15:15). We are the apple of his eye (Zechariah 2:8). He loves us with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3). He has created a place for us in Heaven (John 14:2, 3). He realized all his negative self-talk was a lie. “I began to discover these truths slowly, then learned how to step into them and live them.”

I asked if therapy or a spiritual mentor is helpful. “Yes, both can be invaluable,” Drury agreed, “but statistically, the most effective counselor is a listening friend, someone who will help you discover the problem, its extent, the damage done, and then assist you in finding God’s truth and encourage you to obey it.”

Prayer is also an essential component in one’s search for healing from silent suffering. “As the hurting individual cries out to God, his greatest resource, and as others who know of his struggle pray for him, changes occur.” But of course, some situations such as attempted suicide or drug addiction require competent professional help in addition to spiritual support.