A Letter From The Bottom Of The Mountain
On depression, grief, and the stories Christian men aren't allowed to tell.
I've been writing this since January.
God kept telling me to finish it. I kept finding reasons not to.
I’ve put it off because it’s been too painful. I haven’t wanted to sit in the pain. I’ve wanted to push past it, not think about it.
But it just seems these days, no matter what I do or how hard I try, the pain keeps returning. I can’t stuff it down. I can’t ignore it. It sits in the corner of the room with me. Not dramatic, not monstrous. Just… there. Heavy.
I pray often. I ask the Lord to change my circumstances… to take the pain away. He hasn’t answered in the way I keep begging Him to. And if I’m honest, part of me is tired of asking.
However… He has been speaking. I keep hearing the voice of the Holy Spirit say, “Write the piece… even if it hurts. Write it because other people need it. Write the letter you wish someone else would send you.”
I’ve been running from this letter like Jonah. I’m afraid at this point, if I don’t write it… God might send a whale.
So here we are.
This is not a victory-lap testimony. There is no tidy bow on this story.
No three-point sermon with alliteration.
This is not the Pastor-CEO memoir chapter written from a lake house, about “those hard early years before the harvest came.”
This is more like a voice note from the guy who is still working the night shift, still getting the rejection emails, still lying awake at 3 a.m. trying to figure out how to keep his family alive without betraying the thing God asked him to do.
This is a letter from the bottom of the mountain.
The Stories We Only Tell After We’ve Won
A few months back, I listened to a podcast for men. Not a Christian one. Just one of those “let’s talk about masculinity” shows that the algorithm handed me when I was tired and scrolling.
They were talking about something I have long felt but have never heard anyone articulate: the way men hide their pain until they can turn it into power.
The podcaster said something along these lines:
For most men in our culture, there is almost no space to talk about your struggle while you are still actively within it.
You can tell the story later. Once you have “won.”
We will listen to the CEO who slept in his car, as long as he is now a billionaire. We will listen to the famous actor describe the humiliating years as a waiter, as long as he is now famous enough to sit on the talk-show couch.
We men like stories about suffering… as long as suffering is a prequel. As long as the dragon is dead and mounted on the wall behind you while you tell the story of how you defeated it with your bare hands.
But nobody wants to hear from the guy who is still waiting tables and bombing auditions. Stories like that hit too close to the bone. They make men fidget in their seats, adjust their posture, look at their phones.
Because the truth is, we all know how thin the line is between “doing fine” and “falling apart.”
All it would take is one bad day.
One corporate budget cut.
One spouse who says she’s done.
One emergency that puts your kid in the hospital and nukes your savings.
One church that decides your role is no longer “strategic.”
Most men don’t avoid the struggling man because he’s pathetic.
We avoid him because he looks like a version of us that we’re terrified to meet.
And since that tension is unbearable, we reach for the nearest emotional escape hatch.
We tell ourselves the struggler must not be working hard enough. Must not be talented enough. Must not be disciplined enough.
Surely he did something wrong.
Because if that’s true… then maybe we’re safe.
Failure, we’ve decided, is just competence that hasn’t sprinted fast enough.
It’s a comforting delusion… right up until life decides to introduce you to gravity.
Now, if you are a Christian man, add another psychological layer: the weight of having to perform peace while drowning.
You are supposed to have the “joy of the Lord.” You are leading your family, maybe serving in ministry, maybe just doing your best to show up at church every Sunday.
You may be dying inside… but you know deep down that Church culture often only really allows men to talk about the dark stuff once you can turn it into a sermon illustration.
“Back then, I went through a really hard season… but THEN God showed up and…”
We are allowed to testify about the pit, as long as we are no longer in it.
Very few of us know how to say, out loud, “I am in the pit right now, and I do not know how this is going to end.”
Because that sounds too much like doubt.
And doubt, we’ve been taught, is faith with bad posture.
A Thousand Small Collapses
Last year, I thought I had finally found a way out of the pit.
But first let me tell you how I fell into it.
For nearly a decade, I had a beautiful season serving as a staff pastor at a church on the west coast. It was a joy. I never had a day where I woke up and dreaded going to the office.
I loved my life, and my work was deeply fulfilling.
Everything was going great, until God decided to push my wife and me into a strange new mission: leave everything familiar, move to the Midwest, and follow a call to disciple young adults.
This was not a clean career move, not a step up. It was more a step sideways into something small, relational, and hard to explain.
So, I built GoodLion Ministries. I taught young adults the way of Jesus, started a discipleship school, recorded theology podcasts in spare rooms, and spent my time mentoring students and youth pastors who reminded me of younger versions of myself.
To pay the bills, I lived somewhat like a New Testament tentmaker with a 21st-century skillset: web design, consulting, marketing, even voice acting… whatever kept the lights on.
It was a strange season of holy whiplash.
One day I would feel like the luckiest man alive, watching students wake up to Jesus and the glory and power of His Kingdom!
The next, I felt like a fool, wondering why God had called me to a ministry with no institutional home, no safety net, and no place to land.
Still, God gave us joy.
After a decade of infertility, our son was born.
I even found a nonprofit job that aligned with my ministry work. I did well and built a lot of things for them. I was promoted. We bought a home in Oklahoma. The ministry was growing.
For a moment, it felt like the story was bending toward momentum.
Then, in 2024, the ground dropped out.
The financial crisis at the nonprofit.
A brutal layoff of me and my team.
Anxiety. Panic.
Sudden betrayals from people in ministry I had once trusted.
The miscarriage.
Depression.
Clients disappearing.
AI wiping out whole sections of my freelance work.
Finances unraveling no matter how many jobs I stitched together.
A quiet, gnawing terror that I was watching my calling evaporate in slow motion.
In a very short amount of time I was blindsided by more pain, depression, and anxiety than I had ever faced in all the other years of my life combined.
During that year, I had a nightmare that I can still see vividly in the back of my mind.
I was standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean when the water turned blood red. A tidal wave rose from the deep, and on the face of the wave was a single word: FAILURE.
I turned and ran, and ran, and ran… until I awoke sweating and gasping…
The feeling from that nightmare chased me into the real world.
Most days, I felt like I was sprinting from a tidal wave of failure, a future where I failed my wife, my son, my students, my family, and every mentor who ever believed in me.
It didn’t matter how hard or fast I worked, prayed, or planned… the sense of collapse was always close behind.
That’s the pit I was in.
Dancing in the Living Room, Dying on the Inside
When my wife and I found out our next child, a daughter, was on the way, I decided I needed to start looking hard for a “normal job.”
You know… the kind of job that comes with things like benefits, a salary, and a clear answer when someone asks: “So, what do you do?”
I told God, “Jesus, you know my heart. I’ve tried to provide for GoodLion through freelance… I believe in what we are building… I am willing to work hard… but Lord… if it is Your will, I am willing to scale back the scope of this ministry if I need to. I will do what I have to do to provide for my family. Please guide me to the right thing.”
Soon, out of nowhere, I got a text from an old friend with an opportunity.
A dream job. Remote, so we could stay in Oklahoma. Ministry-adjacent, creating content that would help people fall in love with Jesus.
Good pay, the best I had ever been offered. Great benefits.
And… people who actually knew me, who said things like, “We see you. We value what you do. You’re the best man for this job. We actually want to build this role around you.”
They told me there was no competition, that the role was essentially custom-made for me. A friend on the inside was vouching for me.
The conversations went well.
I was told, “It’s a sure thing! Get ready. Your life is about to change!”
For the first time in a long time… I let myself breathe.
I started imagining what it would be like to tell my wife and parents, “We’re going to be okay.”
I started thinking about holding my newborn daughter without the constant static of financial panic in the back of my head.
Without having to calculate whether her diapers would come from the grocery budget or the mortgage.
I thought, “Maybe this is the redemption arc. Maybe everything from the layoff, the miscarriage, the years of uncertainty, has been leading here.”
Then, about a month before my daughter was born, my wife was out, and I was home alone with my three-year-old son.
I had eighties music blasting on the TV.
He was running around the house with the wild energy only a little boy can manage.
“Daddy, let’s dance!”
I couldn’t resist.
We danced in the living room as Ah-Ha’s classic “Take on Me” blared.
Me with a stupid grin on my face and no rhythm.
My boy, his eyes lit up with carefree joy.
It was a beautiful moment.
Suddenly, the phone rang.
It was the organization.
“Aaron, we’re so sorry. Our CEO just announced a hiring freeze. The role we talked about, the one we were building for you, it’s off the table. We don’t know if it will ever come back. We’d love to keep you doing some small contract work, but in terms of a job, I wouldn’t count on it. Sorry man.”
“It’s ok... I understand. Thank you for telling me.”
I hung up.
I remember standing there in the living room, eyes glazed, the room spinning a little. Suddenly, his little voice snapped me back to reality:
“Daddy, dance! Dance with meeee!”
I look in my son’s eyes. So carefree.
He has no idea. All he has is joy.
I wanted to cry. But I couldn’t.
I didn’t want my boy to see that.
The eighties songs playlist kept going.
Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” started playing.
I picked my son up and spun him around. He squealed with joy and began dancing like a little madman, smiling at me with pure delight.
A loud voice in my head screamed:
“HOW WILL YOU PROVIDE FOR HIM NOW?”
I died a little inside.
I pasted a smile on my face and tried not to crumble in front of him.
Again the voice bellowed “YOU WILL LOSE THIS HOUSE.”
All the anxiety from the previous months, all the weight of “What are we going to do” crashed back in twice as loud.
“HOW DO YOU EXPECT TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR DAUGHTER!?”
I was staring down the barrel of my little girl’s birth with no job, no safety net, and now, no illusion that something was on the way to save us.
I looked at my boy. I kept smiling.
He laughed. I kept dancing.
“Gotta keep smiling. Gotta keep dancing. Gotta keep moving. Gotta keep running. For Brooklynn. For my boy. For my little girl… Gotta keep going. Oh God…”
Once again, my mind flashed to the tidal wave. Looming. Blood red.
FAILURE.
I had never felt more hopeless.
Never more alone.
Dancing with my son in the living room.
Dying on the inside.
The Manly Art of Bleeding in Private
In that dark season, I reached out to a few close friends. All men I knew to be competent guys with stable jobs and good reputations.
The kind of guys who seem like they always have it together.
I asked some version of the same question to each of them:
“How do you do it? How do you not fall apart under this kind of pressure? You seem so collected and steady.”
Every single one of them essentially said the same thing.
“Aaron, I am constantly falling apart too. I’m just better at hiding it than you are.”
One of them opened up about a situation even worse than what I was facing—an invisible crushing weight that he carried daily while showing up for work, church, and family like everything was fine.
Like a man walking around with a knife in his back, smiling through the bleeding.
Another said, “I don’t even know how to talk about this stuff. I’ve internalized that men are supposed to be solid. I don’t know how not to fake it.”
And I thought: of course he doesn't. Because most of us learned long ago that the fastest way to avoid dealing with something is to stay impossibly busy.
Busyness, it turns out, is an excellent anesthetic. Highly recommend it for avoiding surgery on your own soul.
You can spend years… even decades running so fast that the thing chasing you never quite catches up… until the day God decides to slow you down.
Until the day the calendar clears, the serving opportunities dry up, and you find yourself standing in a quiet room with yourself… and you realize: the wound was never treated. It was just bandaged over with activity, and the very good feeling of being needed.
This reminds me of something Henri Nouwen writes about in The Wounded Healer:
Nobody escapes being wounded.
We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?
Henri Nouwen
Our wounds are not things we leave behind in order to minister, they are the very places from which we minister.
But most of us men have been discipled into a counterfeit masculinity where wounds must be hidden until they scar over and can be turned into testimonies we can share at the pancake breakfast.
We feel deep down that we are not allowed to bleed in public.
Recently, I sat with a youth pastor in his thirties, a man only a couple of years younger than me. We were at a great pizza restaurant, just two ministry guys grabbing lunch.
I asked him the question I wish more people would ask me.
“How are you, really?”
The dam broke.
He started talking about foster care, about the nine months they had a child in their home, a child they loved like their own, a child the system then took away.
He told me about how, not long after, the system came knocking again with another child before they even had time to grieve the first.
As he told this story, he started to cry right there at the table, and then immediately apologized and called himself pathetic!
As if tears were a design flaw God forgot to patch out of men.
I reached out and told him, “You are not pathetic, bro! You are human. What you are walking through is inhumanly hard. No one should have to carry this and pretend it’s fine.”
I said to him the words I have desperately wanted men I respect to say to me.
No fixing. No quick verse. No appeal to “just keep hustling and it’ll all work out.”
Just, “I see you. This is hard. You are not crazy for feeling like this. Jesus is with you.”
The Mountain in Your Mind
For most of my Christian life, I have carried around an image in my head.
Maybe you have too.
The image goes something like this:
The life of faith is like a long climb up a holy mountain.
You start at the bottom. You are young in your faith, full of baggage, sins, anxieties, unresolved trauma. You strap all of that on like a heavy backpack and start climbing.
You read your Bible. You pray. You serve in church. Maybe you get a ministry job, or some kind of leadership role.
You say yes whenever someone asks you to help. You try to be faithful, dedicated, creative, and hard-working.
Somewhere in the back of your mind is this picture of the top of the mountain.
The place where the mature Christians live. The steady ones. The respected ones. The men who never seem to sweat or doubt or check their bank account at 3 a.m.
The men who preach the sermons and write the books and seem to have an endless reservoir of calm stability.
The implied message is, “If you climb hard enough, for long enough, you will get there too.”
As a result, every slip, every sin, every setback, every layoff or closed door or confusing season feels like tumbling back down the rocks.
In my head, when I was a youth pastor in California, I was halfway up that mountain.
When I moved to Oklahoma, I assumed the climb would continue. I would climb through faithfulness in a new place, through serving and showing up and teaching and building, through saying yes to whatever doors God opened.
Instead, for a thousand complicated reasons, it has felt like I rolled back down and slammed into the gravel at the bottom.
There are days I do not even know which direction is “up” anymore. When every path looks like it might be a trap door.
If you are a man reading this and your life has not gone the way you expected, you know that feeling.
The vertigo of looking around at your peers and thinking, “Everyone else found the path to the summit. They’re all up there with their matching backpacks and their Instagram posts about perseverance. Meanwhile, I’m just here in the shadows trying to keep my kids fed and my faith intact.”
The Gospel for Men at the Bottom
A while back, a church asked me to teach their youth group through the book of Galatians in one twenty minute sermon. Which is hilarious when you think about it.
“Cover this entire book in a way that will make sense to a middle schooler in the timespan of two cartoon episodes.”
But, glutton for ministry punishment that I am, I said yes.
So I sat down and read Galatians. Then I read it again. And again.
Then, I went for a walk.
Walking around my neighborhood, thinking about Paul, thinking about that image of the mountain… something hit me in a way it never had before.
The mountain in my head is not the mountain in the gospel.
And the more I sat with that, the more some pieces of the struggle began to line up.
Think about why men hide their pain until they’ve won.
Think about why we can’t speak the struggle while we’re still in it.
Why we can only testify about the pit once we’re standing on the other side of it, cleaned up, composed, story wrapped neatly with a bow.
It’s not just a cultural thing.
It’s a theology.
Somewhere deep in our bones, most of us—men especially—believe that God is at the top of the mountain, and we have to earn our way there by our merit and grit.
That suffering means we’re still in the middle.
That being at the bottom means something is wrong with us… maybe even that something is wrong between us and God.
And if God is at the summit and you’re still down here in the dirt…
You don’t talk about it.
You wait until you’ve climbed.
Paul is writing Galatians to people who have swallowed exactly that lie.
You have to earn it. You have to perform. You have to get righteous enough, disciplined enough, healed enough.
And Paul turns to them and says, with what I imagine was a kind of holy exasperation… no.
Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? — Galatians 3:3
You could never climb that mountain.
You’d have collapsed on the trail, map in hand, trying to figure out which color-coded path represented “true righteousness.”
You wouldn’t make it to the top.
You would not even have made it out of the parking lot.
That’s not a criticism. That’s actually a theology of freedom.
Because here is what actually happened:
Jesus looked down at us from the summit we could never reach.
And he didn’t shout, “Try harder! Get it together! Hustle! Work harder!”
No.
He came down.
He came down and picked you up off the gravel, covered in the mud of your failures, your fears, your unanswered prayers and unfinished stories… and he carried you to the top of the mountain on His own bleeding back.
Not when you had it together.
Not after the redemption arc.
Not once you’d turned the suffering into something presentable.
While you were still a mess.
If you belong to Jesus, you do not start at the bottom of the mountain.
You start at the top. Day one.
That’s no metaphor. That’s Paul’s actual language:
But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.
Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.”
So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir.
— Galatians 4:4-7
You are already accepted. Already forgiven.
Already seated at the table as a son… not a contractor on probation, not a slave proving his worth… a son, with full access to the Father, not because of what you’ve built or what you’ve overcome or how quietly and strongly you’ve carried the weight.
Just because of Him.
The story our culture tells men… the one that says you cannot speak your struggle until you have conquered it, that suffering is only worth sharing once you’re on the other side, that the pit is only allowed to be mentioned in past tense…
That story is not Christianity.
It is the opposite of Christianity.
The Jesus of Galatians does not say, “Come back when you have something impressive to show me.”
He says, “Bring me the unfinished story.
Bring me the 3 a.m. panic and the bills and the calling that doesn’t make sense.
Bring me the prayer you’ve prayed a hundred times with no answer.
Bring me the broken version of you that you’ve been hiding from everyone else.
Bring me your anger, bitterness, and hurt.
Bring me the things you are most ashamed of.
You do not have to wait until you’ve won. I already won. For you.”
You are not earning your way up to anything.
You are working out, slowly and imperfectly, what it means to already be there.
Most of us don’t quite believe it.
Like a man who inherited a great mansion, but keeps trying to pay rent.
The mountain is not a ladder to climb. You cannot scale it with grit and willpower and white-knuckling your way through pain in silence.
It is not a place you work to… it is a place you start from. A vantage point into a Kingdom. A place where you finally begin to see both yourself and the world clearly.
From there, life with Christ looks less like a straight hike to some higher tier of holiness… and more like an open world exploration.
A path to walk that is not linear, but winding and wandering. Where the goal is not the destination, but the King you encounter on the journey.
One day, the path winds into serving Him in obscurity… and He meets you in the silence.
Another day, it goes through changing diapers and helping your wife through the loss of a loved one… and He gives you the courage to love well.
Other days the road winds through the valleys… through layoffs and setbacks.
Through sickness.
Through the third rejection email this month from a job you were “perfect for.”
Another, through caring for foster kids you might lose.
Some days the path may lead to preaching to hundreds, other days it is listening to one discouraged young man in a restaurant while your own heart is breaking in the same language as his.
But your position with God is not changing with the terrain… or your performance.
Nouwen’s “wounded healer” is not presented as a man who fixed himself and then returned to the village a guru with advice from the summit.
No… he is the one who has discovered that Jesus sits with him in his wounds, and out of that presence, he can sit with others in theirs.
If that is true, then there is something unbelievably freeing here for men like us.
It means the bottom of the mountain feeling is not the truth about where we stand with God.
You can be broke and confused about your calling, overlooked by every institution you thought was watching, staring at the ceiling at 4 a.m. wondering if anyone would notice if you just disappeared… and still, in Christ, you are already seated with Him at the top of the only mountain that matters.
It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.
— Galatians 5:1
You have nothing left to prove.
Which means you are finally free to tell the truth.
For the Man Who’s Been Holding It Together
To the man reading this on his lunch break in the car, staring at his phone while crumbs from the drive-thru fall into his lap.
To the one who extended his lunch by ten minutes because going back inside feels like putting on armor you’re too tired to wear.
To the pastor who cries in the church bathroom between services, and then wipes his eyes and walks back out to the lobby with a smile.
To the dad dancing with his kids in the living room, feeling like his insides are hollow.
To the single guy who feels like time has passed him by. Who watches his friends post their family Christmas cards and wonders if God forgot to mail his invitation to that life.
To the man who longs to be a father but still cannot conceive.
To the married guy who feels guilty that he is struggling when “on paper” his life looks stable.
To the ministry worker carrying quiet frustration toward a system that does not know what to do with him.
To the man who has started to feel like a subscription service nobody remembers canceling… the sort of man institutions use for a season and then quietly move on from when the budget tightens or the vision shifts.
You are not invisible to God.
Even if you have become invisible to the institution.
You are not pathetic.
Being overwhelmed does not make you less of a man.
The fact that your life with God doesn’t look like the success stories you’ve been fed is not indication of spiritual deficiency… it is raw, honest humanity.
You are not alone in this.
There are more of us than you think, sitting in pews and office chairs and driver’s seats, holding it together on the outside while something frays on the inside. Like a rope that looks fine until you actually need it to hold weight.
Here’s what I want you to know… you are not waiting to be healed so that you can be used by God one day.
The apostles were all deeply broken men who came to follow the Master, dragging their own burdens and baggage behind them.
And still, Jesus says “come.”
We are being invited to meet Jesus here, in the middle, and let him use us as we are.
To remember that even though we feel like we stand at the bottom of the mountain, because of Christ, we are standing at the top.
Lewis wrote that God whispers in our pleasures and shouts in our pain. I do not pretend to have decoded all the things God is shouting in mine.
But I know at least this:
He has been shouting, “Stop pretending you are okay so that you can be useful. I did not save a future, cleaned up version of you. I saved you. Right now. When you feel like you’re at the bottom. That is exactly the man I want.”
My financial anxiety has not been fixed since the layoff in 2024. I still have not found consistent work, neither full time or freelance. My small ministry working with young adults and creating resources for people still feels like it’s surviving on a prayer.
I am still confused about what my future looks like vocationally.
Some days I have faith. Other days I have crippling melancholy, imposter syndrome, and a sense that I should just give up on all the things God has called me to because I cannot understand how on earth I am supposed to do them.
And yet, Jesus continues to say to me “I did not call you to understand. I simply called you to obey. And part of that obedience is not just to work hard, but to accept that the work can never earn you the love you already have.”
So here is my small act of obedience.
This is me, in real time, refusing to wait until I have a lake house, a ministry staff, and a neat moral of the story.
This is me writing from what feels like the bottom of the mountain, trusting what Galatians says, that in Christ I am already seated with him, already beloved, already adopted… even when my bank account and my résumé and my sense of purpose all look like they’ve been run through a shredder.
Even when everything in my circumstances feels low and small and confusing.
In Christ, I have enough.
In the simple Gospel, I am already found by the Father.
And He cares for me.
And it’s that truth that allows me to keep dancing in the living room with my son, even when I am not sure where the next paycheck will come from.
If any of this resonates with you, brother, can I ask you to do one brave thing?
Tell someone.
You were not made to carry your struggle alone.
Tell a friend. Tell a counselor.
Tell your wife.
Tell a mentor who is not invested in defending the systems that are crushing you.
Tell the truth about where you are at. Not polished, not in past tense.
Not with a sermon outline and a redemption arc cued up.
Just, “I am not okay right now, and I need someone to sit with me in it.”
You do not have to wait until the story is over to speak.
You do not have to climb your way up to God. Jesus already carried you.
You are standing at the top of the mountain… even if your emotions have not caught up yet with that reality.
And from that place, even at the bottom of everything else, you are seen.
By God. By Jesus.
By at least one fellow wounded man, typing these words, refusing to stay silent anymore.
-Aaron
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Bro., I feel every sentence of this deeply. When I read about thinking God is only at the top of the mountain, it almost broke me. Thank you for sharing this and thank you for clinging to God in all of this. You know I’m praying for you and your family. And I’m praying that others who need this article, like me, see it.
Wow, thank you for sharing. As a woman who was exposed to the lie of ‘pull yourself up by the bootstraps and fix yourself before’…I can see part of the struggle and understand it. I loved this piece because I have my husband and am a mother to two boys and it helps me understand their struggles and mindset better. I will be processing this for awhile.