Walking In Faith When Your Spouse Is Struggling

Me and my husband for the last almost year have been walking through one health issue after health issue with his body.

It has been a journey of highs and lows. Happy days, and nights of confusion and frustration.

Hard questions, harder feelings to sit with, and disappointment on both ends.

As the spouse who is having to watch her husband struggle and wants desperately to fix him, night after night of silent prayers and pleas to the Lord with little to no physical changes or improvements for me to see in his health felt discouraging, to say the least.

And in these seasons where we are waiting for God to move, it can be easy to feel hopeless, weary, and frustrated at the situation, God, and yourself for “not handling things better.” when our spouse needs encouragement and we don’t even know where to start.

Regardless of why your partner is struggling, whether it’s from grief, health issues, spiritual dryness, etc.

The Lord sees you, the partner that is just trying to make things better.

The partner that just wants them to be ok.


It can be easy to become discouraged in rough seasons where your faith feels tested as you watch your loved one battle attack after attack.

Because when you’re waiting on God to move in your loved one’s life, the wait can feel unbearable, and can cause you to feel helpless.

But where discouragement, exhaustion, and disappointment try and settle into your heart (or maybe they already have), the Lord invites us to lay all our worries, expectations, striving, and fear down at His feet so that He can renew our strength like the eagles with His love, and refresh us with His truth.

One way the enemy likes to discourage both parties is to make you feel isolated and abandoned by God.

When you feel like your prayers are hitting the ceiling,
or you get answers, see behaviors, or meet resistance that causes you or both parties’ pain…it can feel isolating, and cause a person whom the enemy is trying to discourage to point an accusing finger at God.

Have you abandoned us?
Do you even see what’s happening?
Why aren’t you healing them?
Why have you allowed this to happen?
When will you answer my (or our) prayers?

While these questions can feel all-consuming and overwhelming, we want to encourage you and remind you that you are not alone, and to bring those heavy thoughts and burdensome fears to the Lord, because His love isn’t put off by our pain.

Whether your spouse’s battle, and thus yours, is physical, spiritual, emotional, mental, financial, etc…scripture tells us that the Lord is in fact near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.

So we can have the confident hope that even though we might not be seeing the changes or healing we want to see in our spouses’ lives at this time, while we might be struggling to remain hopeful and an encouraging place to land daily for our spouse, we can be sure that the Lord is both our safe place and number one encourager when we feel like we have nothing left to give and our hearts feel fragile and broken.

The Lord will provide, fill up, and tenderly care for our heart so that we might care for others and endure the trial of having to wait on God to move in the space between you and your spouse.

When we walk through a season as a spouse watching our other half suffer, it can be easy for us to place the mantel of savior onto our own shoulders overtime.

We have all the answers
The routines
The scripture
The mindset
The control…
Until we don’t.

When we try and try to fix our spouse out of fear, control, pride, etc.…we are operating in works.

When doing so, we aren’t allowing the Lord to convict, heal, steer, and prune our spouses’ hearts.

Our best efforts to fix our spouse can be the very thing that causes them to feel overwhelmed, discouraged, and over exasperated.

This is exactly what I did with my husband.

My desire to see him healed, changed, and thriving quickly turned into control, nagging, fear-based routines, and more.

Not because I necessarily wanted to be God, or control my husband…but I felt that if I just did more that my husband would feel better.

I had taken another person’s healing into my own hands, believing that if I just could move things around in his life, that I would be able to fix him.

When I stopped taking my spouses healing and walk with the Lord into my own hands and instead chose to follow daily biblical practices and habits that built up my faith and renewed my joy in Christ, I became happier, more patient, gentler and more hopeful.

And so did my husband.

Instead of trying to take our spouses healing and or change of heart into our own hands, may we pursue a better way of walking alongside our spouse and the Lord in this season of trials…

May we instead look to Jesus, who is the bread of life, the satisfier of our thirst, and fills us overflowing even when we walk through the valleys and feel like we don’t have enough faith.

Pray the Psalms

When we feel as if we don’t have the words to pray by ourselves, with, or over our spouse; turning to scripture to help guide us in our prayers is an effective and biblical way to help encourage our hearts to trust in Jesus.

The book of Psalms is a wonderful place to start (though it is not the only place you can go to for this), and an example of praying through the psalms could go a little something like this-

A Psalm to cry out to the Lord to and cling to His promise to save:
Psalms 34:17-22
The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears,
and rescues them from all their troubles.
The Lord is near the brokenhearted;
he saves those crushed in spirit.

How To Pray It:
I [your name] cry out, and You Lord hear, [me or us]
and will rescue [me or us] from [name the struggle].
You Lord are near to [Me, Us, Name however it should apply], who is brokenhearted; [name why]
You [will] save [me or us] who is crushed in spirit. [/save us, me, them, from____name your problem]

Pursue regular alone time with the Lord

Whether it’s listening to your favorite worship song, reading Liturgies, watching a teaching, memorizing the names of God; it’s important that if we want to be a holy reflection of God’s love as our spouse grapples with trials, that we must turn to our source and satisfier.

Deliverance Prayers

When you’re experiencing a day, or your spouse is, where one or both parties is struggling with fear, anxiety, depression, hopelessness; it is important to instead of running from those heavy feelings, pushing them away, or acting like they aren’t there to instead prayerfully take them to the Lord and ask Him where they are coming from.

There is a difference between working through natural emotions that come from having to walk through the valleys, and being influenced and held in bondage by spiritual powers whose main goal is to keep you in cycles of depression, fear, and more.

Writing down deliverance prayers for certain topics that continually resurface was one of the ways the Lord healed me and strengthened me in my own time of physical illness.

An example on, let’s say, anxiety/ panic attacks is below:

“Heavenly Father, I come before you today boldly in Jesus’ name, and thank you for the blood of Jesus, your healing, your mercy, and your love. Father, I come before you today and confess that I have allowed the enemy to cause me to be fearful of the future. 

To instead of trusting you and leaning on you, operating in fear, anxiety, worry, and dread and projection of evil into the future. I repent, and ask for your forgiveness, I accept your forgiveness and forgive myself and in Jesus’ name I rebuke, bind, take authority, and command any and all spirits of fear, anxiety, worry, dread and projection of evil into the future to leave me in Jesus’ name, go now.

God’s word is clear, that I haven’t been given any of you spirits, but a spirit of power, love, and a sound mind. I thank you, Lord, for your steady, unfailing love. Help me to trust you as we walk through this valley, to lean onto you and not my own wisdom and understanding. I choose, Lord, to walk in the peace you have offered me. Peace not as the world gives, but as you give.

I trust you, In Jesus name, Amen.”

As you and your spouse navigate this life, your desire to be your other halves biggest supporter (other than the Lord) will shift and grow as you lean more and more into the healing, satisfying love of God.

Trust that when you have days where you feel discouraged and overwhelmed with your lack of hope, that the Lord will meet you right there, and in His strength, carry you through and teach you to draw your hope, security, and joy from Him.