IT DOES not help, in my experience, to shout at someone: “Pull yourself together”.

But “getting it together” is a good aim and people find all kinds of ways to do this.

One way is being away for some days of silence. I met someone I know after a 10-day silent retreat.

When I told her where I had been she said: “That would finish me off”. I tried to reassure her that I found it life-giving.

Christians travel through each year with the Church’s calendar of events, and now we are in Lent. The focus is the account in the Gospels of Jesus spending 40 days in a desert to do some hard thinking and praying.

I have walked across some of that same Judean desert. The silence is alive. A friend told me a the story that on one of those walks a senior Church leader could not stand the silence and turned back from the walk. IIt can be searching.

Jesus’ experience is often called his “temptation”, although “testing” would give more of the idea.

He had to allow the roots of his identity, his integrity and his motivation to be searched before setting out to teach, heal and lead people in public. He fought off, we are told, the offer of miraculous food, celebrity stunts and limitless power. But there was a price to pay: divert your allegiance away from God. He would not do that.

Yes, silence is searching. And our thinking goes deep, right to the roots of our personality.

We might prefer to avoid that – there can be some disorder down in the depths, so better to keep functioning on the surface.

Yet the silent times can be creative, as they were for Jesus, if we let the loving God bring his order to our depths.In saying this I am not describing an unusual human experience, but how it is for all of us. I am privileged to serve as a trustee of the charity Restore, based at Manzil Way in East Oxford.

The teams there support people who are dealing with challenges to their mental health and who are on the way to recovery. Members have made it through to being confident again and even gaining employment once more.

We are all on a spectrum, as it were, of mental health. There are times of nervous anxiety or depression which hamper our life but can be lived through while keeping much of life going.

And there can be more serious challenges which disable our day-to-day living and need stronger support.

There are the times too of being well and able to enjoy life and relationships. We all move along the spectrum and back.

What we hope and pray for is that our journey can be overall moving forward. That is why Christians come back every year to Jesus in the desert, allowing the love of God to growGod a little bit more.

As we know love at deeper and deeper levels, we are more and more “getting it together”.