Many of us were given God, but not the permission to fall apart. I love the church and this is a conversation for people who genuinely love the church and all that it stands for.
Like me, I know you too have been waiting for someone who loves the church to say this plainly.
The African church, in the traditions most of us were raised in, has taught us that struggling means we do not believe enough. That anxiety is a lack of trust in God. That depression is a spiritual state that only prayer and worship should resolve. That going to therapy is what you do when prayer has not worked. And that to admit you are not okay, in any public way, is to announce a failure of faith that reflects on you, on your family, and on God himself.
Let me be very clear about what I am and am not saying.
I am not saying the church intended harm. I believe that genuinely. I am saying that a theology, however well-intentioned, is not innocent of its effects. And the effect of this particular teaching, compounded across decades, across families, across entire communities, has been a generation of young people who are performing wellness on the outside while quietly falling apart on the inside. And who feel guilty about falling apart. Not just sad. Guilty. Ashamed. Spiritually implicated in their own suffering.
Let me show you something in scripture that I think most of us have been taught in the past.
“How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?” — Psalm 13:1-2
This is the Bible. This is not a person who has lost their faith. This is David — the man described as after God’s own heart — addressing God directly in the language of abandonment, of prolonged sorrow, of the feeling that God has turned away.
And then Psalm 88 — which I want you to read this week, all of it — ends in darkness. No resolution. No triumph. No ‘but I will trust in you.’ It ends in the line: ‘darkness is my closest friend.’ And it is in the canon. The community of faith chose to keep it. Because they understood something we have forgotten.
Honesty with God is not weak faith. It is the most honest form of strong faith.
I want to introduce a distinction that I believe will change how you think about your relationship with both your faith and your healing.
I call it the difference between bypassing faith and holding faith.
Bypassing faith uses spiritual language to skip the actual work. It says: pray, trust, give it to God, cast your burdens — and it says these things as a substitute for the honest, costly, slow work of actually processing what you are carrying. The practices are not wrong. Prayer and surrender are real and powerful. The problem is when they are used to go around suffering rather than through it.
Holding faith does something different. It says: bring all of it — the pain, the confusion, the rage, the despair, the thing you have not said out loud to anyone — bring it into the presence of God in its raw form. Do not tidy it up first. Do not resolve it before you pray. Bring it as it is, and stay there.
This is lament. It is the single most dominant mode of relating to God under pressure in the entire Hebrew scripture. It is what David did. It is what Job did. It is what Jesus did from the cross when he cried Psalm 22 in a voice of desolation. And it is what the African church, in its hunger for triumph, largely removed from its practice.
I want to speak directly for a moment to the person this video is for.
You are educated. High-performing. The person your family is proud of. You are also the person who lies awake at 3am thinking thoughts you have never said out loud to anyone. You grew up in church and you know the language, you know how to sound okay, how to appear full of faith, how to perform the kind of strength that African Christianity rewards. And you are exhausted by the performance.
You are not sure you can bring this to God because somewhere along the way you absorbed the teaching that God is disappointed in struggling. You are not sure you can bring it to a therapist because nobody in your family has ever done that and you do not know what it says about you if you do. And you are sitting in the middle of two worlds that both seem to ask you to leave part of yourself at the door before entering.
I want to be the door that does not ask you to leave anything.
This is what I believe, after everything I have studied and everything I have lived:
You are not struggling because your faith is not enough. You are struggling because you are human. And whoever told you those two things were in conflict told you something that is not in the text.
The church gave you God. It did not give you permission to fall apart.
I am giving it back.
About Sandra
Sandra Nkenchor is a faith and mental wellness educator working at the intersection of Christian faith, psychology, and the specific experiences of young African professionals and their families. Follow for more teaching.