Being told to “just pray about it” can make pain worse because the phrase often works as a closing door, even when it sounds like an open one. It asks you to move your hurt out of sight before anyone has seen it. The pain does not leave. It goes somewhere quieter and does more damage there. The Bible offers a different way to bring pain to God, called lament, and this guide is built to help you practice it.
The material comes from the Human Suffering chapter of Faith That Makes Sense, a Jude 3 Project curriculum. You can work through it alone in one sitting or with a group over a single meeting. The guide moves in order: first a term, then what happens when that term describes your experience, then a common misunderstanding, then two Scripture readings, then a practice. Each step depends on the one before it, so it helps not to skip ahead.
Start with the words you were given
Before any explanation, collect your own evidence. Write down one phrase someone said to you when you were hurting. The curriculum lists a few common ones: “just give it to God,” “choose joy,” “everything happens for a reason.” Yours may be different.
Next to the phrase, answer three short prompts in plain words:
- What were you carrying when you heard it?
- What did you do with the pain afterward: say more, say less, or stop talking?
- Did the phrase change how you thought God felt about you?
Keep this page. You will come back to it at the end. If you are in a group, this writing stays private. No one needs to read theirs aloud.
What spiritual bypass is
The curriculum gives the experience a name. Faith That Makes Sense defines it this way: “Spiritual Bypass is the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”
Read that definition slowly, because the key word is avoid. Bypass does not mean using spiritual practices. It means using them for a specific job: getting around the pain instead of going through it. A road bypass lets traffic skip a town. Spiritual bypass lets a conversation skip the hurt.
The curriculum is also careful about why people do this. It does not assume cruelty. Church can feel unsafe to a hurting person, it says, but “often, it is simply because they are uncomfortable with pain.” That matters for two reasons. It means the person who told you to pray it away was probably trying to help. It also means good intentions do not cancel the harm.
Bypass carries a hidden message. In the curriculum’s words, “It suggests that if your faith were strong enough, your pain would be gone.” Follow that logic one step further and you reach the painful conclusion the curriculum names next: if you are still hurting, you must not be praying enough. Now the problem is no longer your loss, your diagnosis or your wound. The problem is you.
Check your understanding: Look back at the phrase you wrote down. Was it used to meet your pain or to end the conversation about it? The same words can do either job. The function is what you are testing, not the vocabulary.
How hidden pain changes shape
The next step explains why bypass makes things worse instead of merely failing to help. The curriculum says that when trauma is prayed away, it goes underground. Then it adds: “Unprocessed pain festers. It transforms into shame, anxiety, and a distorted view of God.”
Take those three results one at a time, because they form a chain.
Shame. If strong faith is supposed to make pain vanish, then pain that stays becomes evidence against you. The curriculum puts it sharply: if you believe God needs you happy in order to count you holy, every moment of grief starts to feel like sin. Grief is a normal response to loss. Shame turns it into a moral failure.
Isolation. Shame makes you quiet. Quiet makes you alone. The curriculum says this silence confirms the sufferer’s worst fear, that they are “too broken for community and too messy for God.” Notice that the fear has two parts. You feel unwelcome with people and unwelcome with God at the same time.
A distorted view of God. This is the most serious result. If you learn that God only wants your cleaned-up self, you come to believe something false about him. You begin to picture a God who is impatient with tears. That picture can outlast the original pain.
One analogy may help, with a limit. Bypass is like putting a bandage over a splinter. The skin looks handled. Underneath, the problem keeps working. Here the comparison breaks down: grief is not a foreign object you can pull out and be done with. Some sorrow stays for a long time, and healing does not always mean it disappears. The point of the analogy is only this: covering a wound is not the same as tending it.
The curriculum also explains why tending usually requires another person. It says trauma experts speak of a “corrective emotional experience,” and it argues that “Trauma is often caused by relationships, such as betrayal, abandonment, or abuse, and therefore, it must be healed within relationships.” In this account, healing happens when you show a safe person your darkest shame expecting judgment and receive kindness instead. Then comes the sentence that explains this guide’s title: “Just pray about it robs us of this experience by demanding we hide the broken parts.”
The misunderstanding to avoid
A reader who has followed this far can easily land in the wrong place: So prayer is the problem. I should stop praying about pain and just talk to people.
That is not what the curriculum argues, and it is not what Scripture shows. The issue was never prayer. The issue was prayer used as a way out of honesty. Scripture actually invites us to bring our burdens to God. First Peter 5:7 says, “Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.” The verse does not tell you to stop caring or pretend the weight is gone. It tells you where to put it, and it gives the reason: he cares for you.
So the useful distinction is between two kinds of praying:
- Praying about your pain: telling God exactly what hurts, in your own words, including anger and confusion.
- Praying instead of feeling your pain: using spiritual words to skip the hurt, quiet it, or prove you are fine.
The first is lament. The second is bypass. They can use the same words, which is why the difference is easy to miss. Faith That Makes Sense answers the worry directly: “Lament is not weak faith; it is faith refusing to give up.”
Read two laments closely
The curriculum says lament is the Bible’s language for suffering and that more than a third of the Psalms are laments. Read the two below with a pencil. Observe first. Interpret second.
Psalm 13
Read all six verses. The psalm opens with a complaint aimed straight at God: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). Verse 2 continues: “How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?”
Observation tasks:
- Count how many times the writer asks “how long.” What does repetition tell you about how he feels?
- Find the line where the tone shifts. Psalm 13:5 says, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation.” What has changed in the writer’s circumstances between verse 1 and verse 5? Look closely before answering.
- Notice that the hard verses are not deleted once the hopeful verse arrives. Both stay in the psalm.
Psalm 13 is poetry, so read it as a prayer that moves, not a report of events. The movement toward trust comes through the complaint, not around it. That is the reverse of bypass.
Psalm 88
Now read Psalm 88. It begins, “O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee” (Psalm 88:1). Then read straight through to the end. In the KJV the final verse says, “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness” (Psalm 88:18). The curriculum cites a modern rendering of that last line, “Darkness is my closest friend,” which captures the same bleak ending in plainer English.
There is no turn toward hope at the close. The prayer simply stops in the dark. The curriculum draws this conclusion: “God included this in Scripture to show us that raw, unresolved honesty is an act of worship.”
One honest caution. The psalm describes a prayer. It does not command you to feel this way, and it does not promise you a specific outcome. What it does show is permission. A prayer with no resolution still counts as prayer, and it is still addressed to the “God of my salvation.”
John 11
Last, read John 11:17-44. Jesus arrives after Lazarus has died. The curriculum points out that he already knew resurrection was coming. Then John 11:35 records what he did: “Jesus wept.”
Ask the observation question: what did Jesus not say? He did not tell Mary and Martha to stop crying because he had a plan. He had the best possible reason to bypass their grief, and he entered it anyway. If knowing the happy ending did not stop Jesus from weeping, then tears cannot be a sign of weak faith in you.
A practice for this week: one honest sentence
This practice comes in two parts. Do the first even if you skip the second.
Part one: pray toward God, not around the pain. Read Psalm 13 out loud. Then say or write one sentence to God that begins, “God, I don’t understand why You,” and finish it honestly. Do not polish it. Do not add a hopeful line just because you think you should. If a hopeful line comes, let it come. If it does not, stop there, as Psalm 88 does.
Part two: bring it to one safe person. Return to the phrase you wrote at the start. Ask yourself whether keeping that pain hidden has helped or hurt. Then consider one person who has shown they can listen without fixing: a friend, a pastor, a counselor. You decide whether and when to speak. A safe person is someone who has earned trust, not someone who simply holds a title.
The curriculum is clear that community has limits and that professional care is part of faithfulness. Its guidance to leaders reads, “Know your limits: be a bridge to professional counselors, not the cure.” Jude 3 Project holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. If what you carry includes depression, trauma or anxiety, a trained counselor is one of the safe people this practice has in mind. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. If someone at home is hurting you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
The other side of the practice. This week, if someone tells you something hard, notice the urge to explain or fix it. The curriculum suggests a simple alternative: “That’s really hard. I’m sorry you’re going through this. I’m here.” Romans 12:15 says, “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” The command is to share the weeping, not to end it.
Using this with a group
If you lead a group, your main job is to avoid doing the very thing this guide describes. The curriculum’s leader material says, “Silence may be the most pastoral response. Don’t rush to fix what God hasn’t yet explained.” When someone shares pain, let a moment pass before anyone responds. Do not answer grief with a verse. Do not ask anyone to share their opening page or their honest sentence. Keep personal sharing optional, and if someone discloses abuse or danger, follow up privately and help them reach professional or emergency help rather than continuing the discussion.
It helps to name one ground rule out loud at the start: in this conversation, no one is going to be told to feel better.
Questions for discussion
- In your own words, what separates praying about pain from using prayer to avoid it? Can you think of an example where the same sentence could do either?
- The curriculum traces a chain from hidden pain to shame to isolation to a distorted view of God. Which link in that chain seems hardest to break, and why?
- Psalm 13 moves toward trust. Psalm 88 does not. What would be lost if Scripture contained only the first kind of lament?
- Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus while knowing what he was about to do. What does that suggest about whether grief and faith can exist at the same moment?
- The curriculum argues that wounds caused by relationships are often healed within relationships. Where does that claim match your experience, and where might it need care or limits?
- What makes a person safe to bring pain to? What makes someone unsafe, even if they mean well?
- Think of the last time you comforted someone. Did you offer presence, explanation, or a quick fix? What would you try differently?
Come back to your first page
Look again at the phrase you wrote at the start and what it did to you. You now have a name for what happened, an account of why it hurt, and two psalms showing that honest complaint is a form of prayer. The curriculum puts the invitation simply: “Christianity does not demand that you pretend to be healed before you are.”
The question worth carrying through this week is not whether you have healed. It is whether you have stopped hiding. Write one line under your original phrase that answers it.