There was a season in my life where I did not want to get out of bed.
I did not want to preach. I did not want to return calls. I did not want to keep going. I was a pastor, which meant I was supposed to have answers, be available, stay steady, and show up. So I did what a lot of people in that position do. I worked more. I stayed busier. I convinced myself that if I just pushed harder, the weight would lift.
It did not lift. It got worse.
I became more cynical. More isolated. More exhausted in a way that sleep could not fix. I was performing fine while falling apart on the inside. What eventually pulled me through was my wife, my ministry coach, and the decision to get professional help. Not just pray more. Not just push through. Actually get help.
I am telling you that because I think someone reading this needs to know that their pastor has been in the dark place too. And because the church needs to do better than silence on this topic.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. And this is a conversation we keep avoiding.
Why the Church Gets This Wrong
The church talks about physical health. We talk about financial health, relational health, even spiritual health. But mental health gets treated like a category that does not quite belong. Like it is a faith problem dressed up in clinical language. Like if you were just trusting God enough, the anxiety would go away. The darkness would clear.
That is not theology. That is shame. And it is keeping people from getting help.
Here is what I know after more than twenty years in ministry: the people sitting in our churches are carrying more than we see. Anxiety. Depression. Trauma. Grief that never got processed. Loneliness that does not make sense because they are surrounded by people every Sunday. And most of them have never said a word about it inside a church building because they are not sure it is safe to.
That is on us.
What the Bible Actually Shows Us
The Psalms are not a collection of highlight reels. They are raw, honest, sometimes desperate conversations between a human being and God. David wrote about his soul being in anguish. About crying out and feeling like God was not there. About being so low he could barely function.
Psalm 22 opens with the words Jesus quoted from the cross: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That is the prayer of a man in genuine despair bringing his actual state before God.
Psalm 88 is worth its own blog. It is the only Psalm that ends with no resolution, no praise, no triumphant turning point. It just ends in darkness. And it is in the Bible. That means God was not afraid to include the voice of someone who had not found the way through yet.
Elijah, right after one of the greatest moments of his ministry, sat down under a tree and asked God to let him die. He was done. Burned out. Past empty. And what did God do? He did not lecture him. He did not question his faith. He let him sleep. He sent an angel with food and water. He addressed the body before He addressed the soul.
Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. Not because He did not know what was about to happen. But because grief is real, loss is real, and He did not perform His way around it.
The Bible is not full of people who had it together. It is full of people who were honest about falling apart, and a God who met them there.
Masking It Makes It Worse
I tried to outwork my way out of depression and anxiety. More sermons. More meetings. More productivity. I thought if I stayed busy enough I could stay ahead of what I was feeling.
What I actually did was exhaust myself further and lose perspective on nearly everything. The cynicism that crept in during that season scared me more than anything else. I started to see people differently. I started to quietly resent the work I had given my life to. That was the sign I could not ignore anymore.
Masking mental health struggles does not make them go away. It delays the reckoning and adds more damage in the meantime. I know because I lived it.
What I needed was having the right people around me and the courage to be honest with them. My wife saw what I could not see about myself. My ministry coach asked the questions I had been avoiding. A professional helped me understand what was actually happening and gave me tools to work through it.
Getting help was not a sign that my faith had failed. It was one of the most faithful things I ever did.
The Church Should Be the Safest Place to Not Be Okay
We serve a God who entered into the full weight of human experience. He was not distant from suffering. He walked straight into it. That means the church, of all places, should be the community where people do not have to pretend.
Not a place where people perform wellness on Sunday and fall apart in private. Not a place where struggle is treated as a spiritual deficiency. A place where someone can say, I am not okay, and be met with presence instead of a Christian platitude.
That starts with honesty. From the pulpit. In life groups. In the parking lot after service.
It starts with pastors saying out loud that we have been in the dark place and that getting help was one of the most important decisions we ever made.
And it starts with you deciding that the person next to you is worth asking about. Not the reflex exchange we all default to..
What Comes Next
This is Part One.
Part Two is coming, and it is practical. We are going to look at some of the most powerful mental health stories in the Bible, what to do if you are the one struggling, how to show up for someone you love who is in a hard season, and local resources available to you right now.
Because the conversation does not stop at naming the problem. The church has an opportunity to actually do something about it.
And that starts with being honest enough to keep reading.
