{"id":26868,"date":"2026-04-15T13:19:03","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=26868"},"modified":"2026-04-15T13:19:03","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:19:03","slug":"what-is-spiritual-bypassing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=26868","title":{"rendered":"What is spiritual bypassing?"},"content":{"rendered":"


By Kaeley Harms<\/span><\/span>, Tuesday, April 14, 2026<\/span>Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n

This morning at women\u2019s Bible study, something happened that instantly fired up the hamster wheel in my brain. A woman I didn\u2019t recognize sat at our table and made it immediately obvious that our normally peaceful, contemplative dynamic was going to be disrupted.<\/p>\n

The question before us was this:<\/p>\n

\u201cName a time you felt disappointed by God and had to wrestle through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

New lady was the first to answer: \u201cIf you actually have faith in God, He can\u2019t disappoint you. You just have to remain in prayer when times get hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if I agree with that,\u201d I countered. \u201cGod knows we\u2019re human. We\u2019ve got all kinds of Scripture showing heroes of the faith who struggled to believe in the goodness of God in the midst of struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI felt really disappointed that God provided miracles for all these other people but not for me,\u201d I confessed.<\/p>\n

The story had not even fully escaped my lips before the new lady responded. \u201cBut did you even marry a Christian?\u201d she demanded.<\/p>\n

I did not have the time, bandwidth, or, quite frankly, the patience to explain how narcissists can shapeshift and make you believe they\u2019re something they\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

Hindsight is a Hell of an office assistant, always ready with color-coded folders and confident conclusions long after the damage is done. It\u2019s fluent in the shaming techniques of \u201cYou should have known better\u201d and \u201cIt was technically your fault,\u201d quietly sabotaging already fraught journeys back to stable ground.<\/p>\n

I took a deep breath and, as I tried to quickly form a gracious response, she continued firing, \u201cThat\u2019s why you have to just keep praying and believing. You can\u2019t afford to just quit when it gets hard.\u201d And my very favorite of her contributions to the discussion: \u201cThere\u2019s always a light at the end of the tunnel.\u201d<\/p>\n

You guys\u2026<\/p>\n

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, \u201cI understand exactly what you mean, Kaeley. Faith is not a formula, and if we can\u2019t admit we struggle sometimes, we\u2019re never going to get where we need to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

God bless this woman.<\/p>\n

Do I internalize her judgments? Not at all. She\u2019s obviously just at a different place in her own journey, and the Lord will deal with her the way He deals with us all \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

The whole experience got me thinking about how often we do this \u2014 how often I<\/em>\u00a0do this \u2014 without even realizing it.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d like to admit) it\u2019s something else wearing the costume of those things. Theologians and Christian counselors have a term for it: spiritual bypassing.<\/p>\n

If you think of a bypass in any other context, let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve all heard the analogy about how prematurely removing a caterpillar from its cocoon strips it of its ability to fly. It\u2019s 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\u2019s use of refining fire to develop believers into the people He intends for us to be.<\/p>\n

So why do we do it? And I don\u2019t just mean the woman at my Bible study table \u2014 I mean\u00a0we<\/em>. Me. You. The well-meaning friend who responds to your miscarriage with \u201cGod needed another angel.\u201d 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 \u201cYou didn\u2019t get your miracle because you didn\u2019t have enough faith\u201d comments are offered as well-intended feedback when your faith is already flailing.<\/p>\n

Part of it is simple discomfort. Other people\u2019s pain is destabilizing, and a clich\u00e9 is a way to regain footing fast. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think we\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cHow long, oh Lord? How long?!\u201d<\/p>\n

We invite people to admire our scars but never to bind our wounds. Scars say, \u201cGod brought me through the fire,\u201d where wounds scream out, \u201cI\u2019m still in it. Lord, take this cup from me!\u201d<\/p>\n

If I had to guess, the people who offer spiritual bypassing most frequently to others are only doing so because they\u2019re actively doing it to themselves, too \u2014 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 \u201ctaking every thought captive\u201d means executing the thoughts that make us look weak or sound untrusting.<\/p>\n

But when we do this to others, when we hand someone a formula in the middle of their freefall, it doesn\u2019t land as faith. It lands as judgment. It communicates, however unintentionally, \u201cYour pain is making me uncomfortable, and I need you to wrap this up.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0It sends people back underground with their doubt, their grief, their quiet rage at God \u2014 alone now, and newly ashamed of it.<\/p>\n

James opens his letter with what might be the most countercultural sentence in the New Testament:\u00a0\u201c<\/em>Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.\u201d We\u2019ve heard it so many times it\u2019s lost its scandal.<\/p>\n

But notice what he does not say. He does not say, \u201cpretend it isn\u2019t happening.\u201d He does not say \u201cremind yourself there\u2019s a light at the end of the tunnel.\u201d He does not say, \u201cat least you\u2019re not going through something worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says, \u201cconsider it joy,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0which 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

If His power is made perfect through our weakness, the very least we can do is stop pretending we don\u2019t have any.<\/p>\n

Originally published at Honest to Goodness.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kaeley Harms, Tuesday, April 14, 2026Getty Images This morning at women\u2019s Bible study, something happened that instantly fired up the hamster wheel in my brain. A woman I didn\u2019t 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[6102,583],"class_list":{"0":"post-26868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-christian-living","8":"tag-bypassing","9":"tag-spiritual"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}