Scott box had been a successful worship leader for 25 years, externally proclaiming the love of God. However, internally his world was in chaos, consumed by mental illness.

Box was raised as a hero and groomed to be a worshiper, but his mental health continued to get in the way. 

Sadly, by the mid-2000s, an undiagnosed mental disability began torturing his mind. The unbalance shattered him to the point he could not be either the hero or the worshiper he had once believed he was supposed to be. His mind and his heart were broken. He was living in disgrace.

“I was desperate,” Box freely admits. “That desperation could have driven me in one of two directions: it could have driven me to end it all or into friendship with Jesus and hope. Instead, it became hope bound up in desperation. That’s what Jesus does.”

After years of struggling, Scott was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He says that gave him a sense of relief.

Eventually, his determination to regain his health helped him begin to untangle what he grew up understanding about heroes and worshipers. Ultimately, Jesus showed him how to begin to pursue God and reflect Him as a habit, to become a heroic worshiper.

“Jesus’s heroism is not the world’s kind, where people crush others,” Box writes in Heroic Disgrace. “The heroism that Jesus modelled was the opposite. He propped up the weak and the broken. Jesus came to serve not to be served. That type of heroism gave meaning to my pain and helped me make sense of my life.”

Scott is now detailing his journey with bipolar disorder in his debut book, Heroic Disgrace: Order out of Chaos. Hope out of Fear. – A Worship Hero Story.

Today on Connections, Scott shares with us his spiritual journey. He also describes what it was like to be standing on a platform and externally proclaiming the love of God while his interior world was a cycle of shame.