Stop Rushing the Hurt

Struggling with your mental health is not proof that your faith is broken. That sentence is harder to accept than it sounds, especially for people who were raised to believe enough faith should fix anything. Pray more. Believe harder. If you still hurt, the problem must be you.

A note before you read. This piece addresses mental health, depression, and suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Veterans can call 988 and press 1 to reach the Veterans Crisis Line. This content is not a substitute for professional mental health care.

On this week’s episode of the March or Die podcast, licensed marriage and family therapist Rebecca Maxwell named that belief for what it is.

“If you just prayed more, you wouldn’t have depression. If you just had more faith, you wouldn’t struggle. I think we’re leaving people out and shaming people too much.”

She is not arguing that Scripture is insufficient. She affirms it is the source of healing. Her point is that God made us as integrated beings, heart, soul, mind, and strength, and a wound in one of those does not mean a deficit in the others. A man can love God with everything he has and still be carrying something his brain was never built to carry.

But the real value in the conversation is not the diagnosis. It is the trap most believers fall into while trying to do the right thing.

Maxwell calls it spiritual bypassing.

It happens when someone is hurting and the people around them, or the voice inside their own head, rush them straight to the hope. God is good. They’re in a better place. He works all things together for good. Every one of those statements is true. That is exactly why they are so easy to weaponize against a grieving person. You hand someone the right answer at the wrong moment and you teach them that their pain is an inconvenience to be skipped.

“We either want to speed through the hurt to get to the hope, or we want to swim around in the hurt for too long,” Maxwell said. “We’re not great at the middle ground.”

The middle ground has a name in her work. She calls it “the and.”

You can lament and believe there is hope. You can grieve the loss and trust that God is not finished. You can sit in what is not fair and still hold onto what is true. The mistake is treating those as a sequence, hurt first, then hope, hurry up. They were always meant to be held together. “You can’t rush through that first part to get to the second part,” she said. “It has to be there together.”

There is nothing weak about staying in the grief that long. David does it through the entire book of Psalms. He pours out the rawest version of what he feels, the anger, the fear, the sense of abandonment, and then he remembers what God has done. The honesty comes first. The hope is real precisely because he did not skip the honesty to get there. When Lazarus died, Jesus knew He was about to raise him. He wept anyway. He stood in the grief with the people He loved before He did anything about it.

There is also a reason most men, especially those who come out of the military and first responder world, are bad at this. The same discipline that makes you effective in the fight tells you to suppress, compartmentalize, and drive on. That works in combat. It quietly destroys you at home. The instinct to skip the hurt and execute the mission is the exact instinct that buries a wound for a decade.

Maxwell offers one more piece of language worth carrying with you. “One loss is many losses.” When you lose a job, you do not lose a job. You lose the income, the identity, the routine, the people, the version of the future you had already written. When someone dies, you lose them and every ordinary thing that came with them. Most people grieve the headline and bypass everything underneath it, then wonder why the hope never quite lands.

Here is the one thing to do this week.

Pick the loss you have been rushing past. The one you keep answering with a verse before you have ever actually said out loud what it cost you. Then do the harder thing first. Name what was lost, all of it, the small pieces under the big one. Say it to God the way David did, without cleaning it up. Say it to one other person who will sit with you instead of fixing you.

You are not betraying your faith by grieving. You are doing what the faithful have always done. The hope comes after, and it holds, because you did not skip the part that makes it real.

There is one more thing Maxwell would not let pass. Do not do any of this alone. Isolation and shame are the enemy’s two favorite tools, and a struggling person reaches for both by instinct. So at a minimum, get two people praying for you by name. She calls them mat carriers, the four friends who carried the paralyzed man to Jesus when he could not get there himself. If you are on the mat, you need people to carry it.

Because hope, in the end, is not a concept you talk yourself into. “Hope is not just this concept,” Maxwell said. “It’s a person. And that person is Jesus. He wants to be right there with you in whatever you’re going through. You are not exempt from his love and his care because you’re struggling mentally.”

You do not have to have it together to be met by Him. You just have to stop pretending the hurt is not there. Honor it. Then keep marching.