Faith isn’t always a song. Sometimes it’s silence. Sometimes it’s the weight in your chest or the prayer that doesn’t come out.
I wrote recently about how it can be hard to pray. That post came from the same place this one does: the collision of my faith, my own deconstruction, and my mental health. Depression and anxiety are not just private struggles for me. They press into the very practices I was taught to depend on: prayer, worship, and even reading Scripture.
When the Practices Don’t Come Easy
For a long time, I thought faith meant doing all the “Christian stuff” without faltering. Show up. Pray hard. Read daily. Worship freely. But when depression clouds over, prayer feels impossible. When anxiety tightens my chest, sitting still with Scripture feels unbearable.
Deconstruction only complicates it. The simple answers don’t work anymore. The sermons I once leaned on feel too neat. And so, I find myself in the strange space of still wanting God, believing, but struggling to do the very things that once marked faith.
Maybe that’s you, too. And perhaps you need to hear this: it is okay if faith feels hard. It is okay if you can’t pray like you used to. It is okay if your anxiety follows you into worship.
The Bible Doesn’t Hide This Struggle
Scripture gives us permission to feel this tension.
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?” (Psalm 42:5)
“You have taken from me friend and neighbour. Darkness is my closest friend.” (Psalm 88:18)
Job curses the day of his birth (Job 3:1–3).
Elijah collapses under a broom tree and prays, “I have had enough, Lord. Take my life.” (1 Kings 19:4).
Jeremiah laments bitterly: “Cursed be the day I was born.” (Jeremiah 20:14).
And Jesus himself says in the garden, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” (Matthew 26:38).
If this is in the Bible, then you have permission to bring your sorrow too. You do not have to hide it or cover it with worship songs you can’t sing.
When Faith Becomes a Weapon
There is another layer to all this. It is not just the depression or the anxiety or the silence of God. It is the voices around you.
“If you prayed more, you wouldn’t feel this way.”
“If you just trusted God, the anxiety would go away.”
“Maybe you’re not as faithful as you think you are.”
I have heard those lines. Sometimes out loud. Sometimes in the quiet judgments that float in church air. They land heavily. Because if you are already depressed, those words do not lift you. They bury you. Suddenly, it is not just your mental health you are fighting; it is the shame that you have somehow failed God by being human.
This is spiritual gaslighting. It turns faith into a weapon. It tells you that God is measuring your serotonin levels and writing them down as proof of your devotion. That is not gospel. That is cruelty dressed up in religious language.
The Bible never says, “the faithful never falter.” What it does say is that “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18). What it does say is that Christ himself was “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” (Isaiah 53:3).
So let me say it plainly. You are allowed to be a Christian with depression. You are allowed to follow Jesus while anxious. You are allowed to belong even if you never get “better.”
The Weight We Carry and the Silence of God
Depression changes how the brain works. Anxiety floods the body. Trauma plants itself deep in memory. None of this is weakness. But it makes faith practices like prayer, silence, and Scripture feel like mountains you do not have the energy to climb.
And when God seems silent on top of it, the weight doubles. Prayer feels like speaking into an empty room.
That silence is not new. Israel wandered in it for forty years (Deuteronomy 8:2). The exiles sat by Babylon’s rivers, asking how they could sing the songs of Zion in a strange land (Psalm 137:1–4). Four hundred years of silence stretched between Malachi and Matthew. And then Jesus himself cried from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, quoting Psalm 22:1).
The mystics dared to say this silence is not always absence. St John of the Cross called it the “dark night of the soul.” In that night, prayer feels empty, but God is nearer than ever, stripping away illusions and deepening love. Silence can feel like abandonment, yet it may be the place where God is holding us most closely.
So hear this: it is not a failure of faith to feel the weight of depression or to sit in silence where God feels far. You do not have to “fix yourself” before God will listen. You are allowed to come as you are, heavy, anxious, waiting in the quiet.
Not the End, Just the Beginning
This is not where the story resolves. It is just where it begins with honesty. Faith and mental health do not meet in quick fixes. They meet in ache. In saying the truth out loud.
If you are depressed, anxious, exhausted, or carrying grief, you are not less faithful. You are walking with Job in the ashes. With Elijah under the tree. With Jeremiah in the ruins. With Jesus in Gethsemane.
So take permission. You do not need to be a “better Christian” before you can come to God. You are already beloved. You are already enough.
Faith is not the absence of ache. Faith is bringing the ache to God, even when you are not sure God is listening.
Scribbling Theology 