When You’re Smiling on the Outside but Breaking Inside
A woman shook my hand at the door after service one Sunday. Big smile. “Doing great, Pastor. God is good.” Three weeks later I sat across from her in my office while she told me she hadn’t felt anything in months. Not grief, not joy, not even much of God. She’d just gotten very, very good at the handshake.
I’ve thought about her a lot. I think about her every time someone tells me they’re “fine,” because I’ve learned that fine is one of the most carefully guarded words in the church. I’ll come back to what I told her, but first, let’s be honest about the thing almost nobody says out loud.
You can be falling apart and still show up. You can lead the small group, run the snack table, post the encouraging verse, and drive home with your chest full of cement. From the outside, nothing looks broken. Schedules don’t stop for broken hearts. Inside, though, there’s a tremor running under everything, and you can’t always explain it even
The mask isn’t lying. It’s surviving.
Here’s something I wish more people understood: the smile you put on isn’t always hypocrisy. Often it’s survival. When the pain is too big to explain in a hallway conversation, “I’m good, just busy” is what comes out, because you’re tired of watching people’s faces change when you tell the truth.
The trouble is that a mask worn long enough starts to fuse to the skin. What began as protection becomes a prison. I’ve preached for years that joy and happiness are not the same thing. Joy is found within; it’s internal, while happiness deals with the external. A mask can only ever manage the external. It does nothing for the part of you that’s actually cracking. You get so practised at managing how you appear that you lose track of how you actually are. I’ve seen strong, faithful people wake up one day and realize they have no idea what they feel anymore, only what they’re supposed to feel.
If that’s you, I want to say plainly: you’re not a fraud. You’re a person who has been holding a heavy thing for a long time with no safe place to set it down.
What numbness actually is
A lot of folks assume numbness means they’ve stopped caring, or that their faith has gone cold. I’d gently push back on that. Numbness tends to be the opposite of indifference. It’s what the heart does when it has felt too much. It’s a circuit breaker tripping so the whole house doesn’t burn.
Think of a phone left on silent in another room. It’s still ringing. Calls are still coming in. You just can’t hear any of them. That’s emotional numbness. The feeling hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s been switched to silent so you can keep functioning. It’s a common, understandable stage of healing, not a failure of faith. The problem is, you also can’t hear the good calls. The laughter. The wonder. The quiet sense of being loved. The same switch that mutes the pain mutes the joy.
So if you’ve been going through the motions, showing up and doing the next thing while feeling almost nothing, please don’t read that as proof you’re broken beyond repair. Years ago, studying the twenty-third Psalm, I wrote that it is the soul that remembers every detail of life, and when life deals painful blows, it is the soul that suffers the most. Numbness isn’t a sign the soul has died. It may simply mean you’ve been carrying more than one person was built to carry, for longer than anyone noticed.
God is not fooled by the handshake
Here’s a strange comfort. The performance that fools the people in the lobby has never once fooled God. He sees behind the smile, and this is the part that undid me in my own hardest season: He doesn’t seem the least bit put off by what’s back there.
The Bible is full of people who dropped the mask in His presence. David, who could rally an army, wrote that his tears had been his food day and night. He didn’t say, “I’m a man of faith, so I shouldn’t feel this.” He brought the unedited version of himself to God. Even Jesus, the night before the cross, didn’t tell His friends He was fine. He said His soul was “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” If the Son of God let people see the weight He carried, maybe you and I can stop pretending we don’t have any.
There’s a verse I keep coming back to: God is “close to the brokenhearted” (Psalm 34:18). Not close to the impressive. Close to the broken. Which means the realest version of you, the one under the handshake, is exactly the one He’s already near.
So what do you do tonight?
I told you I’d come back to what I said to the woman in my office. It wasn’t a five-step plan. I told her to find one person and tell them the true answer to “how are you.” Not the lobby answer. The real one. Even if her voice shook.
That’s my nudge to you, too. Pick one safe person, a friend, a counselor, or a pastor who won’t flinch, and let them see one inch behind the mask this week. Numbness loosens its grip the moment it stops being a secret. You weren’t designed to thaw out alone; we tend to heal in the presence of people who let us be honest.
And before that conversation even happens, you can drop the mask with God right now. You don’t need the right words. You can pray something as plain as, Lord, I’ve been performing. Here’s what’s actually true. He already knows. Saying it just lets the air in.
The woman with the perfect handshake? She’s smiling again now. A different smile. Slower. Real. The kind that costs nothing to wear because there’s nothing hiding behind it. It didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by trying harder to feel better. It happened the day she finally told the truth. I’ve long believed that’s how the Shepherd does it: shame, grief and guilt melt as snow on a warm sunny slope, as a tide of faith, hope and love floods your soul. It rarely comes all at once. But it comes.
You may be tired of holding the mask up. You don’t have to anymore. And by the grace of God, the smile that comes next will be one you actually mean, even if you can’t picture it yet.
This post is adapted from themes in You Will Smile Again: How God Restores Joy After Deep Pain and Heartbreak, releasing October 20, 2026. If the smile you wear has started to feel like a costume, you can set it down for five quiet mornings. Start with my free devotional, When You Can’t See How: A 5-Day Strategy to Smile Again.
A gentle note: if the numbness has settled in and stayed, that is not a faith problem to hide; it is a wound to tend. Alongside prayer and Scripture, a trusted pastor or a qualified Christian counselor can be one of God’s best gifts in this season, and if you ever feel unsafe or in despair, please reach out for help right away.
