Tag: Hope & Healing

Did'ya blow?

When You Feel Like You’re Letting Everyone Down

darin

One of the cruelest lies depression, anxiety, trauma, and other mental health conditions whisper is this:

“Everyone would be better off without me like this.”

Most people who are carrying these heavy burdens already know their struggles affect the people they love. They see the worry in a spouse’s face. They notice parents who never seem to stop watching them. They hear the exhaustion in a friend’s voice or feel guilty that their children have learned to tiptoe around difficult days.

You don’t need anyone to tell you your suffering has ripple effects. You already know.

Many people living with depression or chronic anxiety carry two burdens at the same time. They bear the weight of the illness itself—and the crushing guilt of believing they are disappointing everyone around them.

It can feel as though you’ve become the string someone keeps pulling on in a family mobile. You didn’t ask for this. You didn’t choose this. Yet every difficult day seems to make everyone else’s world wobble too.

That can become almost unbearable.

You may find yourself apologizing for existing. Saying you’re sorry for another difficult morning. Sorry for another panic attack. Sorry for canceling plans. Sorry for needing help. Sorry for not being who you used to be.

But hear this carefully:

Your illness is not your identity.

Your diagnosis is not your value.

And your difficult season does not diminish your worth in the eyes of God.

Jesus never treated hurting people as inconveniences. He never rolled His eyes at the weary. He never shamed the anxious, the broken, or the exhausted for requiring compassion. Again and again, He drew near to those who believed they had become too much for everyone else.

He still does.

The people who love you may indeed be affected by what you’re carrying. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed them. It means you’re walking through a painful reality together. Love has always worked that way. Families rejoice together, grieve together, heal together, and sometimes simply survive together until brighter days come.

Please don’t mistake needing help for being a burden. Those are not the same thing.

Sadly, some people who turn to faith communities for support encounter misunderstanding or simplistic advice that leaves them feeling even more ashamed. They are told they simply need more faith, more prayer, or more discipline, as though clinical suffering could be solved by trying harder.

Jesus never approached people that way. He met them with compassion before correction. Presence before answers. Grace before expectations.

Again, He still does! 

If you’re struggling today, know this: there is zero condemnation from the heart of God toward you. You are not His disappointment. You are His beloved child, walking through a difficult medical, emotional, and spiritual journey in a broken world.

In Sanctuary Devotional, David Hoskins and I write often about the beautiful partnership between sound clinical care and deep spiritual formation. God often works through counselors, physicians, treatment teams, supportive families, faithful friends, and daily rhythms of grace. Healing rarely happens in isolation.

So if today you feel like you’re letting everyone down, stop for just a moment. Take a slow breath.

The people who love you don’t need you to be perfect. They need you to keep taking the next faithful step.

And God?

His hands are still big enough to hold you—even on the days when you feel too heavy to hold yourself.

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 daily devotional, Sanctuary Devotional: A Mental Health Journey Towards Hope & Healing, COMING FALL 2026.

Did'ya blow?

The Emotional Toll of Loving Someone in Pain

darin

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.