By Kaeley Harms, Tuesday, April 14, 2026Getty Images
This morning at women’s Bible study, something happened that instantly fired up the hamster wheel in my brain. A woman I didn’t recognize sat at our table and made it immediately obvious that our normally peaceful, contemplative dynamic was going to be disrupted.
The question before us was this:
“Name a time you felt disappointed by God and had to wrestle through it.”
New lady was the first to answer: “If you actually have faith in God, He can’t disappoint you. You just have to remain in prayer when times get hard.”
I internally groaned and coached myself toward a civil response, ultimately deciding that humility and vulnerability would probably be more effective than the harsh rebuttal pleading for escape from my razor-sharp tongue.
“I don’t know if I agree with that,” I countered. “God knows we’re human. We’ve got all kinds of Scripture showing heroes of the faith who struggled to believe in the goodness of God in the midst of struggle.”
I went on to share about how disappointed and abandoned I felt when, after 7 years of hardcore prayer and faith for the restoration of my first marriage, it ended in divorce. “I felt really disappointed that God provided miracles for all these other people but not for me,” I confessed.
The story had not even fully escaped my lips before the new lady responded. “But did you even marry a Christian?” she demanded.
I did not have the time, bandwidth, or, quite frankly, the patience to explain how narcissists can shapeshift and make you believe they’re something they’re not. Neither did I have time to explain that this line of questioning is irrelevant and unhelpful to anyone in the middle of the storm.
Hindsight is a Hell of an office assistant, always ready with color-coded folders and confident conclusions long after the damage is done. It’s fluent in the shaming techniques of “You should have known better” and “It was technically your fault,” quietly sabotaging already fraught journeys back to stable ground.
I took a deep breath and, as I tried to quickly form a gracious response, she continued firing, “That’s why you have to just keep praying and believing. You can’t afford to just quit when it gets hard.” And my very favorite of her contributions to the discussion: “There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel.”
You guys…
Thank God the rest of my tablemates were wise old women who have lived a lot of life and more than earned their stripes. Our group leader put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I understand exactly what you mean, Kaeley. Faith is not a formula, and if we can’t admit we struggle sometimes, we’re never going to get where we need to go.”
God bless this woman.
Do I internalize her judgments? Not at all. She’s obviously just at a different place in her own journey, and the Lord will deal with her the way He deals with us all — on His timeline and according to her own unique needs. But did I secretly want to smack her upside the head? I plead the fifth.
The whole experience got me thinking about how often we do this — how often I do this — without even realizing it.
We call it faith. We call it trust. We call it keeping our eyes on Jesus. And sometimes, it genuinely is all of those things. But sometimes (maybe more often than we’d like to admit) it’s something else wearing the costume of those things. Theologians and Christian counselors have a term for it: spiritual bypassing.
If you think of a bypass in any other context, let’s say a gastric bypass, for example, what you are doing is actively rerouting food around part of your digestive system, instead of letting it follow its normal path. A bypass is a shortcut. It skips standard steps to arrive at its destination by intentionally avoiding the normal route. In weight loss, bypass can be helpful because it limits what your body processes, but in faith, bypass keeps you from engaging the very pain that leads to growth.
We’ve all heard the analogy about how prematurely removing a caterpillar from its cocoon strips it of its ability to fly. It’s only through struggling to escape the cocoon that the butterfly develops the strength to use its wings. Similarly, Scripture is full of examples of God’s use of refining fire to develop believers into the people He intends for us to be.
So why do we do it? And I don’t just mean the woman at my Bible study table — I mean we. Me. You. The well-meaning friend who responds to your miscarriage with “God needed another angel.” The pastor who preaches victory so relentlessly that the struggling people in the pews conclude they must be the only ones sitting there with secrets. The “You didn’t get your miracle because you didn’t have enough faith” comments are offered as well-intended feedback when your faith is already flailing.
Part of it is simple discomfort. Other people’s pain is destabilizing, and a cliché is a way to regain footing fast. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think we’ve quietly absorbed the idea that our faith is somehow on trial when we struggle, that if we admit the road is hard, we are poor advertisements for the Gospel. That doubt is a PR problem for Jesus instead of an invitation for His goodness to shine.
So, we perform okayness. We curate our testimonies. We lead with the resolution and skip the part where we were on the bathroom floor at 2 a.m., shaking our fists at Heaven and crying out, like David, “How long, oh Lord? How long?!”
We invite people to admire our scars but never to bind our wounds. Scars say, “God brought me through the fire,” where wounds scream out, “I’m still in it. Lord, take this cup from me!”
If I had to guess, the people who offer spiritual bypassing most frequently to others are only doing so because they’re actively doing it to themselves, too — gaslighting their grief with paint-by-numbers theology that promises tidy solutions and a light at the end of every tunnel. We confuse emotional suppression with spiritual surrender. We think “taking every thought captive” means executing the thoughts that make us look weak or sound untrusting.
But when we do this to others, when we hand someone a formula in the middle of their freefall, it doesn’t land as faith. It lands as judgment. It communicates, however unintentionally, “Your pain is making me uncomfortable, and I need you to wrap this up.” It sends people back underground with their doubt, their grief, their quiet rage at God — alone now, and newly ashamed of it.
James opens his letter with what might be the most countercultural sentence in the New Testament: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” We’ve heard it so many times it’s lost its scandal.
But notice what he does not say. He does not say, “pretend it isn’t happening.” He does not say “remind yourself there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.” He does not say, “at least you’re not going through something worse.”
He says, “consider it joy,” which implies there is something real to consider, something hard enough that it requires a deliberate reframing. You cannot reframe what you have not first allowed yourself to feel.
The most honest thing I can offer anyone who is in the middle of the fire right now is this: your struggle is not evidence of your failure. It is evidence of your humanity, the same humanity God chose to inhabit when He decided the world needed saving. Jesus wept. David wailed. Job demanded answers. Elijah personally saw God send fire from Heaven, and even he sat under a tree and asked God to let him die. And not one of them was disqualified for it.
We cannot bypass the messy parts of our faith, which, ironically, is only fostered through testing and struggle and days of white-knuckling your way back to the foot of the cross.
If His power is made perfect through our weakness, the very least we can do is stop pretending we don’t have any.
Originally published at Honest to Goodness.
Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.
