If you’ve ever been depressed and tried to tell someone about it, you know the look.
There’s a half-second pause. Then the pivot. “Have you tried getting outside more? Maybe some exercise? Honestly, when I’m feeling down, I just…” And you nod along, waiting for them to finish, already certain that whatever they’re about to describe isn’t the thing you’re living in.
It doesn’t really matter who you tell. Everybody’s got a version of the same advice. Have you tried thinking positive. Have you tried a gratitude list. Have you tried just… not being so hard on yourself. All well-meaning. Almost all of it some flavor of have you tried thinking your way out of it.
And then there’s the church version.
Tell a fellow Christian and the same advice shows up with a spiritual upgrade. “Have you been praying? Have you been in the Word? When I hit a hard season, I just lean into God and…” Same pivot. Same quiet certainty that what they’re describing isn’t what you’re experiencing. Except now there’s a sharper edge to it: if their fix doesn’t take, the unspoken conclusion is that the thing that’s broken must be your faith.
And that one cuts deeper. It’s hard enough to be handed advice that doesn’t fit. It’s worse to walk away feeling like you’re failing God on top of it.
We don’t talk enough about the difference between sad and depressed.
Really it’s a spectrum, not two tidy boxes. A lot of us taste some version of depression at some point — a brutal week, a grief that won’t lift, a stretch where the color drains out of everything. That’s real, and I’m not here to wave it off or rank anyone’s pain.
But sad, even heavy sad, tends to be temporary and responsive. It moves when your circumstances move. It answers to time, prayer, community, and the resilience God built into us.
There’s a far end of that spectrum, though, and that’s where this post lives. The kind that doesn’t lift when the situation improves. Sometimes the kind that was never tied to a bad situation in the first place — it just shows up. The kind you can’t reason or pray or grit your way out of, no matter how strong your faith. That end isn’t simply more sad, and it isn’t a contest over who deserves sympathy. It’s a different thing entirely.
A Better Analogy
Imagine someone who badly sprained their ankle years ago. It was painful. It took weeks to heal. They limped around, iced it, stayed off it, and eventually recovered. That experience is real. They know what foot pain is.
Now imagine that person watching someone whose bone is protruding from their leg. And saying, “Oh, I understand. When I sprained my ankle, here’s what I did…”
That’s what it sounds like when someone who’s experienced normal sadness tries to advise someone who is clinically depressed.
Or sharper: imagine telling someone with MS how to walk better because you once had a sore knee.
The advice might be well-intentioned. It might even be technically accurate. But the distance between the advisor’s experience and the other person’s reality is so vast that the advice doesn’t just miss — it lands like a judgment. Like they’re failing at something that should be easy.
It’s in the Bible
The Bible never says “Bible Character X was clinically depressed.” But it describes people who show every symptom of it. And not minor characters. Not people with weak faith.
Elijah. Job. David. The psalmists.
Elijah, fresh off one of the most dramatic demonstrations of God’s power in the entire Old Testament, runs into the wilderness and asks God to let him die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors” (1 Kings 19:4). He’s exhausted, alone, and convinced he’s the last faithful person left. An angel doesn’t show up with better theology. He shows up with food. “The journey is too much for you.”
Job, whose suffering God Himself called undeserved, sits in ash, scraping his wounds, wishing he’d never been born. His friends spend chapters telling him to repent. God shows up at the end and tells them they were wrong.
The psalmists are relentlessly honest:
“My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’” — Psalm 42:3
And Charles Spurgeon, one of the greatest preachers who ever lived, went through long seasons of crippling depression. He wrote about it with more honesty than most:
“The malady is as real as a gaping wound, and all the more hard to bear because it lies so much in the region of the soul that to the inexperienced it appears to be a mere matter of fancy and diseased imagination. Reader, never ridicule the nervous and hypochondriacal, their pain is real.”
Spurgeon wasn’t apologizing for being weak. He was correcting the people who thought he was.
When the Healing Mechanism Is What Needs to Be Healed
There’s a verse in Proverbs that rarely gets preached. I think it should be.
“The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit — who can bear?” — Proverbs 18:14
The first half is remarkable on its own. The human spirit is resilient. People carry incredible physical suffering on the strength of their soul. Modern psychology agrees. Scripture just beat it there by a few thousand years.
But the second half is the part that applies here. A wounded spirit — who can bear?
Steve Bloem, a pastor who has lived through serious depression, put it plainly: “When the healing mechanism is what needs to be healed, that’s a serious problem.”
The thing that helps a person push through hardship is the spirit. But what happens when the spirit itself is broken? You can’t white-knuckle your way past depression using the very thing depression has taken from you. That’s not a spiritual failure. That’s just physics.
I Know This River
Fair warning: oversharing ahead.
I’ve got a small tattoo on my leg: the word “Mornin’” under a coffee cup. Years ago my daughter told me, “You always say that, Dad,” and I liked being the cheery morning guy enough to make it permanent. That’s who I want to be.
It’s also about the furthest thing from where depression takes me. I’ve battled it most of my life (the last couple years, medication has helped a lot — not bulletproof, but a lot). Mine is intermittent and mostly seasonal. Every fall, as the days get short and the light goes gray, something in me starts to slip.
People tend to picture depression as a pit you fall into. Mine has always felt more like a river — and I come by that honestly, because there’s a creek behind my house. Most of the year you’d never know it’s there. The trees in my backyard leaf out so thick they swallow the sound and hide the water, the far bank, and the whole neighborhood behind us. Then fall comes, the leaves drop, and the rooftops start to poke through. I can hear the water again.
The depression works the same way. It doesn’t arrive so much as get uncovered. Most of the year it’s a sound off in the distance, easy to ignore. Then the cover thins, or a stretch of hard rain swells the water, or I just can’t stop listening for it — and there it is again, close and loud and pulling. Some days I’m standing on the bank. Some days I’m in to my knees, feeling the rocks give under me. And every so often I go all the way under, rolling in the current, unable to find the surface. I’m not swimming out of that one. The only way out is if God reaches in and pulls me to shore.
Here’s what depression does that ordinary sadness never did: it turns every good tool into a weapon. Almost twenty years of hard-won truth from recovery, and in the spiral I pick all of it up and use it as a club. You have no reason to feel this way. Look at your life. Be grateful. The gratitude that’s supposed to lift me becomes one more count in the case against myself.
And it spirals fast. A small slight becomes “they’re against me” becomes “you probably deserve it” becomes “you’re too much” becomes “here we are again.” Down and down.
The cruelest trick is what it does to community. I’m a social guy with no shortage of people around me. But depression hands me a mask, tells me to look fine and act like yesterday’s version of myself, and then turns around and swears nobody’s checking on me. Both can’t be true. The mask is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And when I think about reaching out, I run down the list of everyone I love and find a reason each one is the wrong person to call. Too busy. Already struggling. Bound to hand me the same advice everybody does: have I prayed, have I tried getting outside. The list always ends in the same place: nobody. There’s no one I can tell.
And under the lie is a truth the depression doesn’t invent: the people who genuinely understand the water, who’ll climb in after me instead of watching from the bank, are very few. Maybe one. Two if I ask sincerely enough. And how could there be more? You can’t understand the water from the bank — it’d be like expecting someone who’s never had MS to know it from the inside. That’s not their failing. It’s just the distance.
That grace should set me free. Instead, the spiral turns it: See? No one can really understand you. No one’s coming in after you. Why would you even ask? The truest, kindest thing I know becomes one more reason to go quiet and sink.
What’s kept me from going under isn’t better advice. It’s something stupid simple: people who already have a standing claim on me. I meet with a few guys every week for accountability — same time, masks off, no performance, just the real report. Because it’s weekly and it’s close, they’re there even in the seasons I’d otherwise disappear on everyone. And just saying it out loud, “it’s been a bad week,” does more to break the spiral than any amount of thinking my way out of it. If I had to put a number on it, speaking it out is nine-tenths of the fight.
Depression doesn’t just isolate me. It turns me selfish, shrinks the whole world down to my own sinking. So one thing that helps is doing the opposite on purpose: sending my wife and kids a few short texts that ask for nothing and just tell them they’re wanted, that I see them. It’s hard to stay curled in on yourself while you’re busy reminding someone else they matter.
The people who know me and love me do something else I’ve stopped underestimating, even when they can’t be in the room: they pray. I used to file that under nice gesture. I’m not so foolish now. Whether I feel it or not, I’ve come to know it’s doing real work in a place I can’t see.
And sometimes it’s not spiritual or relational at all. It’s almost too dumb to admit. One stretch I was sure I was sliding into a real episode, the heavy hopeless kind, and it turned out I was mostly just dehydrated. Drank a bunch of water and the fog lifted. Depression doesn’t always play fair, or even make sense.
But when it’s the real thing, what gets me out isn’t a technique or a good night’s sleep. It’s a presence. Most of the time it shows up as a song — never the peppy, victorious kind, always something quieter and truer, landing at the exact moment I need it. Sometimes it’s a verse instead. Neither’s a guarantee — they’re just how the presence tends to reach me. And what it tells me, every time, is that I’m not alone in the water. Not because someone finally waded in from the bank. Because Someone was already in it with me.
This is the part I’m least able to explain and least willing to give up. In forty-some years of following Jesus, nothing has marked my faith more than what happens in that water. It’s why you will not talk me out of Him. I’ve met Him at the bottom too many times — not calling down instructions, not waiting on the shore with advice, but down in the current with me, close as my own breath. Proverbs has a line, a few verses down from my wounded-spirit one, about a friend who sticks closer than a brother. Word.
And here’s what I didn’t fully see until recently, sitting under some teaching on the suffering of Christ: He gets it. In Gethsemane, Jesus was the one in the hole. His closest friends couldn’t stay awake to pray with Him. He faced the agony of separation from His Father. He sweat blood. So when Scripture says He was “tempted in every way, just as we are,” that isn’t a technicality. The one who’s down in the river with me has been further under than I will ever go. He doesn’t understand my depression from the bank. He understands it from the bottom.
I come up on the shore, look back at where I was, and feel a gratitude no good day has ever given me — the kind you only learn somewhere you couldn’t save yourself.
There’s more to the river than this post can hold. I shared a piece of it out loud once, river and all, in a prelude to a message a pastor gave at my church, and it may get a fuller telling here someday. But this post isn’t really about the river. It’s about what we do when someone’s in it.
Stop Shouting Down the Hole
There’s an image I keep coming back to from David Murray’s Christians Get Depressed Too. He asks us to imagine someone at the bottom of the black hole of depression — they can barely function, can barely think.
And then he describes what too many people do next:
“The last thing he needs is a preacher telling him to repent and shouting down the hole, ‘Do right and you will feel right!’ Or, ‘Repent of your idolatry!’ He needs someone to shine a light and throw down a rope.”
You just read what the bottom looks like for me. But I’ve been on the other end of this too: up top, well-meaning, armed with a verse, almost certainly saying things that landed exactly wrong without ever knowing it. Help shouted from dry land has a way of sounding like judgment to the person in the water.
What helps is not better advice. What helps is presence. A light. A rope. Practical intervention — including, yes, medical intervention when the chemistry is broken.
Scripture already showed us this. The people who helped most brought bread, sat in the silence, came near — and kept their advice to themselves.
Repentance and theology can come later. First, you help the person get out of the hole.
A Note on Coaching
Part of what I’ve learned doing coaching work is where coaching ends and something else needs to begin.
Depression isn’t a coaching problem. It might coexist with the things coaching is useful for — patterns of thinking, identity work, the primal questions underneath our behavior. But someone in the middle of a depressive episode needs a therapist, a doctor, and probably a community before they need a coach.
One of the things I’m most careful about is not being a coach who shouts down the hole. If something shows up in our work together that feels bigger than coaching can hold, I’ll say so — and I’ll point toward people better equipped to help.
What I Know Now
Depression is real. It is not sadness that prayer will fix if you just try harder. It is not a lack of faith. None of that makes prayer pointless, effort wasted, or faith small — I lean on all three. Depression just means the playbook needs more in it than prayer and grit. The spiritual tools stay; you add the clinical ones. Having it isn’t a verdict on how much you’ve got. Some of the most faithful people in the Bible begged God to let them die.
Give yourself grace while you’re in it, too. The problem usually isn’t that you don’t know what’s true — it’s that you don’t have the capacity to act on it. You won’t be the best version of yourself right now, and that’s allowed. Sometimes the most faithful move is to rest, to just be, and trust that’s enough for the day.
If you’re in the hole right now, I’m not shouting advice from the top. I’m looking for a rope. And also: maybe see a doctor. I mean it.
And if someone you love is in the hole, let go of the idea that you can pull them out. You can’t. They’re the one who has to climb; the most you can do is be there while they do. Throw the rope — they still have to grab it. Shine a light. Sit at the edge. If you’ve got a ladder to get yourself back up, climb down and sit with them a while; they may follow you out, they may not. Pray with them. And sometimes, just let them be.
When you’re not with them, pray — really pray, in faith. I’ve come to believe it’s the most powerful thing you can offer, because some of what pulls a person under was never flesh and blood to begin with (Ephesians 6:12).
A mentor of mine used to sort everything into two piles: problems to solve, and tensions to manage. I don’t think depression gets solved, exactly — not this side of heaven. But it can be walked through. It can be managed. And nobody should have to do either alone.
That’s love.