Last August, I got a call from my buddy, Darren, who's the lead pastor of a church in Long Beach,

and one of a few friends that I kind of do life with, and we regularly call each other to catch up and pray,

and share stuff, and he was really in turmoil that day. He just got a call that a good friend of his,

another lead pastor in the LA area, had just taken his own life via suicide. Andrew Stockheim,

if you know this story, who's 30 years old, wife, three little boys, charismatic, a lot of gifting in his life,

pastor of a large, and still growing church, definitely a workaholic, and something about it just took an

emotional and even spiritual toll on his soul. The stereotype of a pastor is that, you know, we just sit around drink coffee,

chat with people and study the Bible, you know, and that's all I do, but most people have some other things on the

docket. The reality is very different, especially in a mega church like Andrew was in, where you expected not just to be a

teacher and spiritual director, but a CEO, executive director of a nonprofit, management guru, strategic expert, and

you know, therapist, community organizer, all of the above, it's just a lot of pressure. Andrew began to have panic attacks a few years

ago, anxiety, depression, by last spring, he ended up in the hospital after one particularly bad panic attack, and from there, on a four-month

sabbatical kind of a turning point in his story. His first week back from sabbatical in August, to begin actually a series on mental illness,

from the life of Elijah, if you know Elijah's story, there's a point where Elijah full on says, God take my life, it's like the Hebrew

prophet version of on the edge of suicide, and he read stats, Andrew did on suicide, such as the fact that last year 45,000 people in our country alone ended their

life of their own free will and volition. He called there an epidemic, he said it's on the rise, he was honest about the devastating impact of suicide and

mental illness, not just on the victim, but on the family and friends, how catastrophic it is the fallout of that. And then 12 days later, he killed

himself in his church office while his wife and three boys were right outside the window on the church playground. Now mental health is a very complex issue. I know that

unfortunately from personal experience, my autobiography is eerily similar to his, but what struck me about this tragic story was a line from his wife, Kayla, and the teaching that they gave together his first week back from

sabbatical, she said this quote, we still have a long way to go to work through it, but we're all in, you guys, he loves this place so much, he didn't want to stop, he would have kept on going and going and going and going and going, and it probably would have cost him his life. That's how much he loves all of you, that's how much he loves this place. The irony is 12 days later, his work did cost him his life.

The Japanese have a phrase, keroshi, that literally means death by overwork, where people die normally of heart attack, stroke, or even starvation due to overwork, the clinical term is occupational set in mortality.

The term rose to prominence in the 1980s during the stock market boom, when Kamayasuji, who was this poster child, all over Japan, a bit of a national hero, work a holic over the top wealthy in finance, kind of a Titan coach to executives, all over Japan, dropped dead at heart disease at the age of 26.

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