This banger of a question came from our end of year survey, “How do I retain my faith while being a first responder (i.e., frontline mental health, health, child protection) when the workplace culture demands dissonance from Christian values (i.e., black humour, seeing Christians as perpetrators of abuse etc). I personally and others I know in front line work struggle to reconcile their core values and faith with what they see in the world.”

Khaiah Thomson is a hospital social worker, the author of the Blackwood series, and one of our regular writers at Stories I’d Tell You at Dinner. Khaiah, Rach and Bec deep dive into some of the temptations we face as Christians working in frontline mental health and discuss what helps us to reconcile our faith with what we see in the world.

We are interviewing all of our regular contributors for you to get to know them better. Today’s guest is Jill, a GP and cross-cultural worker in the Middle East, who shares beautifully about the cross-section of burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress, but basically: what happens when you feel like you’re being dumped by a wave, angry that you’re the one to fix it all? We also cover how Jill found a richer and deeper faith on the other side of it.