mental health – Scribbling Theology

A solitary figure walks a winding path toward the sunrise, symbolising hope and new creation.

Faith does not erase suffering. If Part I was about honesty in the ache, Part II is about the slow tenderness of hope. Not a hope that denies pain or covers it up, but one that sits with it, honours it, and still dares to believe that God has not let go.

Picking Up the Thread

The Bible’s honesty about despair is matched by its honesty about hope. The psalms of lament often end in trust, but never without tears first. Job ends not with tidy answers but with God showing up in the whirlwind (Job 38). Jesus rises from the grave, but he rises with scars still on his body (John 20:27).

Hope in the Christian story is not neat or fast. It is not the removal of pain but the presence of God within it. Hope does not compete with suffering. It accompanies it. And it points forward, to new creation.

God With Us in Weakness

At the centre of Christian faith is the incarnation. God chose to take on human flesh, not in power but in vulnerability.

The Gospels give us a Jesus who is weary by a well (John 4:6), who weeps at the tomb of a friend (John 11:35), who withdraws to pray alone when the crowds overwhelm him (Luke 5:16), and who sweats blood in Gethsemane under the weight of anguish (Luke 22:44).

This is not a God who condemns weakness. This is a God who enters it.

Paul writes that the Spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words (Romans 8:26). When you cannot pray, when the silence feels unbearable, the Spirit is praying in you. When words fail, God does not. This is the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead and who will one day give life to our mortal bodies (Romans 8:11).

The Slow Dawn of Healing

Psychology tells us that healing is rarely instant. Trauma does not evaporate. Depression is not prayed away. Anxiety does not dissolve just because we will it to.

Healing takes time, care, and patience. It takes therapy, medication, a safe community, and embodied practices that help the body and mind recover. None of these are signs of weak faith. They are means of grace.

Taking your medication can be sacramental. Going to therapy can be more nourishing than confession. Choosing to keep breathing, even when you want to disappear, can be holy. These are not second-rate versions of spirituality. They are faith lived in the grit of real life.

Theologian Jürgen Moltmann once wrote that hope is not an escape from reality, but the strength to endure reality because God’s future has already broken into it. Healing is like that too. Slow. Patient. Painful at times. But still a witness that God is not done.

The Mystic Thread

Mystics spoke of hope not as triumph but as trust in darkness. St John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul” not abandonment but the hidden place where God works most deeply. It is love stripped bare, learning to cling when nothing else remains. Hope is not the quick confidence that all will be fixed, but the quiet courage to stay when nothing makes sense, trusting that God is near even when unseen.

Hope, in this sense, is not shallow optimism. It is not pretending. It is a quiet trust that even in silence, even in sorrow, God is present. It is a trust that the story is moving toward new creation, when God will wipe away every tear (Revelation 21:4).

A Community of Sanctuary

The church at its best is not a hall of triumph but a sanctuary for the weary. A place where people can say “I’m not okay” and still belong.

Too often, churches have offered slogans instead of presence and belonging. But the call of the church is to be the body of Christ, scarred, vulnerable, open to touch. The early church carried one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). They wept together. They broke bread together. They bore witness to a kingdom where the wounded are not cast out but welcomed.

What would it look like if our churches became places where mental health struggles were not seen as shameful but as part of what it means to be human? Places where therapy is affirmed, medication is blessed, and silence is held without fear?

The world does not need churches that tell people to “pray harder.” It needs communities that sit in the dark and wait together for dawn, trusting that God and his kingdom is already breaking in.

The Shape of Hope

So what does hope look like when you live with depression, anxiety, or the weight of trauma?

Hope is not always joy. Sometimes it is simply endurance. Sometimes it is the quiet conviction that your story is not over. Sometimes it is the love of a friend who does not leave. Sometimes it is the courage to wake up to another day.

Hope is the scarred Christ showing up in the locked room to say, “Peace be with you” (John 20:19). Hope is the Spirit praying when you cannot. Hope is the Father who does not break a bruised reed or snuff out a smouldering wick (Isaiah 42:3).

Hope is tenderness. It does not rush. It does not shame. It does not demand. It whispers: you are not alone. And one day, this tenderness will give way to joy when creation itself is made new.

A Closing Blessing

So, may you know that your sorrow is not a failure.

May you find a small mercy in the day, even if it is only breath.

May the silence not undo you, but hold you,

until you can trust that God is still there.

May hope come like a slow dawn,

not rushing, not demanding, but faithful.

And may you remember that the One who carries scars

carries you, too,

into the promise of all things made new.

A lone figure walks a winding path beneath a dark sky, passing a solitary tree, with distant hills fading into shadow.

See part II here

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.

Tag: mental health

Faith and Mental Health, Part Two: The Tenderness of Hope