For over twenty-one years in pastoral ministry and decades spent navigating the intersection of faith and mental health, I have sat on every side of the recovery table. I have been the one crying out from the bottom of a dark valley, and I have been the one standing on the rim, desperately looking down, trying to figure out how to pull someone I love out of the shadows.
If you are currently loving someone who is in deep emotional or psychological pain, I want to say something to you right now that you might not hear within the walls of a typical church building: It is incredibly heavy, and it is okay to feel exhausted.
When someone we love is diagnosed with depression, battling debilitating anxiety, or sorting through the fragmented shards of trauma, our immediate Christian instinct is often to go into “fix-it” mode. We pray harder, we quote scripture, or maybe we accidentally slip into those well-meaning but incredibly painful pat answers. We say things like, “Just surrender it to the Lord,” or “Joy comes in the morning,” as if a chemical imbalance or a deep psychological wound can be swept away by a neat spiritual catchphrase.
But when those quick fixes don’t work—when the morning comes and your spouse still cannot get out of bed, or your child is still paralyzed by a panic attack—a quiet, insidious shift happens in the heart of the one who loves them. You begin to carry an invisible emotional toll.
You start walking on eggshells in your own home, constantly measuring the emotional temperature of the room. You watch the person you love slip further away into an ocean of sadness or fear, and the gap between what you believe (“God is good”) and what you are seeing (“my family is breaking”) begins to feel like a vast, terrifying sea. In the quiet, lonely hours of the night, you might even find yourself fighting your own unexpressed anger—anger at the illness, anger at the situation, and sometimes, a deeply guilt-inducing anger at God for not stepping in faster.
Religious culture often tells us that if we just have enough faith, we shouldn’t feel broken by the storms of life. But when I look at the gospels, I see a completely different Jesus. I see a Savior who looked at people in pain and was moved with profound, gut-wrenching compassion. When Jesus encountered the marginalized, the broken, and those crushed by the heavy burdens laid on them by the rigid religious leaders of His day, He didn’t offer a lecture or a reprimand. He offered Himself. He sat with them in the muck and the weeds.
Loving someone in pain means you are participating in a holy, sacrificial kind of love. But it also means your own heart is sustaining real, measurable bruising. It is not a lack of faith that makes you feel tired; it is the reality of human love in a fallen, fractured world.
In our book, Sanctuary Devotional: A Mental Health Journey Towards Hope & Healing due out this fall, David Hoskins and I wanted to build a literal sanctuary for both the person who is struggling and the one who is walking beside them. You do not have to pretend to be whole while your internal world is fracturing under the weight of someone else’s suffering. The Father’s hands are not resting on the shoulders of the prodigal because the prodigal has it all together; those hands are there to offer comfort in the midst of the brokenness.
If you are the one holding the line for someone else right now, take a deep breath. You don’t have to fix them today. Jesus is not judging your exhaustion. He is inviting you to pull up a chair, sit beneath His gaze, and remember that you are a beloved child of God, completely independent of how well you perform as a caregiver.
Darin Michael Shaw, MDiv, MA, is a collaborative writer, researcher, and veteran of over twenty years in pastoral ministry who has navigated his own seasons of brokenness to find a deeper identity as a beloved son of God. Along with David Hoskins, he is the co-author of the soon to be released morning and evening devotional, Sanctuary Devotional: A Mental Health Journey Towards Hope & Healing.
DARIN MICHAEL SHAW 