"Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you're part of a team!" - so goes the impossibly catchy song from the Lego Movie. In IT, we are often expected to be caught up in that same spirit - hyped up on the adrenaline of fixing systems, catching hackers, and inventing new stuff. These expectations - which come from external sources like our boss or company or IT culture at large, or internally from assumptions we've taken on as personal truths - can fly in the face of how we're actually feeling. When our feelings turn from just being "a little tired", "a little frustrated", or "a little sad" to serious challenges like burn out, rage, or depression, it can be hard to admit, let alone seek help or ask our coworkers for support and understanding. And yet religious, moral, and ethical traditions are rich with stories of people coping with the exact same challenges. In this episode, we're going to get brutally honest about the mental health challenges we've faced and are facing today as well as what lessons from our faiths we can carry with us to provide insight, comfort, and even strength. Listen or read the transcript below.

Speaker 1: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have is people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious.

Leon: 00:24 This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation.

Leon: 00:30 I want to pivot back around though, just talking about the leaders in our faith community and the behaviors or the examples that they show. I read something last year from Rabbi Sacks who is the former chief Rabbi of London. It really surprised me because it was a take on a part of the Torah of the Bible that I wouldn't have expected it and I didn't see it when I was reading it myself. Um, Rabbi Sacks was talking about when he himself feels depressed and overwhelmed and anxious. And he said that whenever he felt that way, he would recall a point when Moses himself reached his lowest point. And this is for those people who want to find it in the book of Numbers, chapter 11, verse 10 or thereabouts. Cause I know the numbering is not always the same between different, uh, versions of the Bible. Um, so the Israelites were engaged in their all time favorite activity: complaining about the food. Uh, in this case, they were recalling fondly the cuisine that they got to have in Egypt, completely forgetting about the fact that they were slaves at the time, that was completely ignored. God is, uh, because of this, understandably angry, but Moses was more than angry. Uh, as Rabbi Sacks describes it, he suffers a complete emotional breakdown. And one of the things he says is, it says to God is, "I cannot carry this whole people on my own. It's too heavy for me." And rabbi sacks continues by saying "...somehow the knowledge that the greatest Jewish leader of all time had experienced this depth of darkness was empowering.." That he, he took comfort in knowing that everybody sometimes gets there. Everybody experiences this. Even the man who the Bible itself says was the most humble human ever to walk... Who will, who did ever or will ever walk the face of the earth. The one human who was righteous enough to speak face to face with God, still had crushing depression that he didn't know how to get past himself. And by the way, um, in this plea to God, "I can't do this." God has an answer. God's, you know, by saying I can't, this God says, okay, here's how I'm going to help. And that also is empowering. Um, so I just, you know, when we talk about the things that we value in our leaders, I think we, we'd be remiss to not mention Moses.

Josh: 03:17 Yeah. To not mention God, right. Beca