Facing PTSD: Finding Hope in Darkness

Facing PTSD: Finding Hope in Darkness

Feb. 25, 2025

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Guest: Dr. Ed Hardesty

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 2/25/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, hello again friends and welcome to the Tuesday edition of Stand In the Gap. Today I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, director of church culture at the American Pastors Network. One of the great benefits and blessings of being a host on Stand In the Gap is that I get to learn right along with you the audience. Most of the time. I know much about the topics that we discussed, but there are days like today where I am sitting in the pupil seat and even though I don’t know a lot about today’s focus, I have been around it and for a long time knew it existed. Originally I heard my parents talk about it. They knew a man who lived across from my grandparents, his name was Fred, and they would sympathetically say the poor soul. He has shell shock from the war and he’s just not right.

Later it was called combat fatigue, and it seems to always be related to war and those who have seen horrendous things that their mind could not forget. Over the years this grew and then after Vietnam, we saw hundreds of service men and women who were afflicted and severely emotionally damaged leading to physical, relational, cognitive, and spiritual crises. We now know it by the term PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder, however, its causes are not isolated to those who are in military. Now, the most common professions that suffer with PTSD obviously are veterans of combat and that can be broken down. Iraqi Freedom had 20% Gulf War, 12%, Vietnam as high as 30%. Police officers, about 10% will experience PTSD, firefighters, paramedics, 20% healthcare, mental health workers, 17%, journalists 30% and disaster first responders and volunteers anywhere from 15 to 30%. Now here’s an interesting fact. Pastors find their way into the top 10 professional list.

The likelihood is that all of us have encountered somebody if not ourselves, with PTSD today, we want to discuss the reality of this problem and try to gain some insights on how to minister to the folks who are suffering from PTSD and help them find hope and wholeness in Christ. And to help me is Dr. Ed Hardesty. Now, Ed has been here with us in the past and our topic then was the world history and how it fits into the biblical framework. He’s a pastor, a Bible teacher from high schoolers to the last 30 plus years in the collegiate level at Cairn University and now at Lancaster Bible College, both in Pennsylvania, but even more importantly for this conversation is Ed is a veteran of the armed services and I have a funny feeling it will be that experience that we will learn most from today. For this topic, Ed, welcome to Stand in the Gap Today. Again,

Ed Hardesty:

Thank you, Jamie. It’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.

Jamie Mitchell:

Now, Ed, I have to admit that the evangelical circles, and especially pastors, we don’t talk a lot about PTSD. We’re aware of it, but my opinion ignorant at best. How did you become aware of PTSD and in what ways have you had to deal with it or better even ministered to those who are afflicted by it?

Ed Hardesty:

Well, you asked a difficult question. It took me 13 years to even begin to figure out what was going on. I had 21 months of combat, the last 12 of which were in Danang. I was in charge of weapons and munitions for a rescue squadron. Before that, I was working in sack munitions and things of that nature, supporting B 50 twos striking into Vietnam. In the midst of all this, especially with air rescue, our advertised mission was trying to help find and extract shot down pilots. It required quite a bit of on the ground sort of work. The unadvertised mission was trying to extract deeply inserted teams of one sort or another. We worked with special forces and recon Marines, people of that nature. In the midst of all this, you see some very badly injured people, mangled folks, and at Danang, the northernmost base in South Vietnam, we got rocketed and mortared with great regularity back on the base, anything but safety in the midst of all this, I also was involved with a very small ad hoc orphanage. It wasn’t anything official near the area of Danang, and in the midst of all the fighting that took place, there was one instance where all the children in that orphanage were murdered in their bunks and then dismembered the following day. We buried 23 children.

You don’t get past things like that, mangled bodies. It’s extremely difficult. It really does wound your soul. And when I came back from Vietnam, PTSD was not on the radar. Nobody was talking about things like this and I didn’t understand what was going either. But as life progressed and got married, children off to bible college, off to seminary, all of this time, I was still struggling with what was going on inside of me. And it’s difficult to define because the dreams and you’re up either sweating or crying, you vacillate from deep depression to anger and there’s nothing to attach it to. You don’t understand what’s going on inside of you. My wife can tell you a number of stories, bless her heart, she didn’t understand what was going on inside of me, but she loved me in spite of it. And frankly, that took me through 13 years out, the memorial in Washington DC was dedicated and on that day, a series of events took place that made me face everything for the first time, really deep dive into it and I just broke down and began to fall apart.

In the midst of that, it took me a while to get my act together and become functional. A couple hours, at least in the midst of some pretty deep agony, a lot of friends that are dead, a lot of buddies are listed on the wall down in Washington. At that point, it seemed like the Lord just got ahold of me and all that poison began to just pour out of me, and from that point on, the Lord began to heal my heart and from that point on I could begin to talk about things. I didn’t talk about any of it. It’s a situation where your soul is wounded and even the dreams are odd because many of them are composites of little vignettes of things you’ve experienced and people dying in your arms and just the gore of a combat situation and retrieving folks out of plane crashes and firefights and things of that nature, trying to save their lives, get them to a medical unit. It’s difficult to even talk about, but

Jamie Mitchell:

We can

Ed Hardesty:

Scratch the surface. Dear, go ahead.

Jamie Mitchell:

We want to talk about trauma, and it’s not that everybody has PTSD, but there are many in our churches today that are struggling with this and from Ed’s experience and his path to healing and coping and finding hope, we’re going to talk about the signs and effects of PTSD. Stay with us as we return. Well welcome back today, Dr. Ed Hardesty is our guest, and we’re diving into the subject of PTSD, post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and how to administer to those who are struggling it. Ed, I want to build on what you’ve shared about your own experience, the obvious painful memories, the scarring of the soul, the heaviness that comes from experiencing as you did a military trauma, but I want to define PTSD and because you could make any tough situation a trauma specifically when we say trauma, what is it that we mean? What is the difference between a difficult life experience like falling off a ladder or having a car accident and trauma?

Ed Hardesty:

Well, Jamie, I think that’s different for everyone depending on your personality, your makeup, your background, how you were raised, but when life’s expectations are dashed, it is sometimes a difficult situation to get through. But we’re talking about a deeply wounded soul, life force being snuffed out, people dying in your arms, abuse of one sort or another that’s utterly outside of the norm and expectations of any person. In these later years since I’ve begun to understand this even more, I’m a chaplain for my local VFW Post and Men come that have been wallowing in this for a long time without some way to really deal with the deepest of the problems. One of the best things that occurs is right out of Second Corinthians when you begin to understand that I don’t need to know the depth of your trauma, all I need to know is that the Lord Jesus and Abba has solved my problems and brought me to a place where I find a comfort level with his arms wrapped around me.

So I want to introduce you to the comforter with which I have been comforted in the midst of this though PTSD really is not your average problem. It’s very much a wounded soul. Something dies inside of you, something breaks you, and you’re always continually broken. And it’s the strangest thing because difficulties along the way, stimuli from outside every now and then will trigger something and you don’t see it coming. You don’t understand where it came from. It may not be directly related, but all of a sudden you’re back where you started and the pain is unique.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah, there is a

Ed Hardesty:

Good remedy for that and I want to talk about it later with you.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah, Ed, we were talking as we were preparing for this. One of the things why this subject is interesting to me and I think important for our listeners is that probably 30, 40 years ago, yes, there was these kinds of things, but I think with the breadth of potential trauma of what people go through with sexual assault and violent crime and racism and then the fear of terrorism, murder and suicide, all these things, it seems like the level of trauma today can touch more people than it did in the past. I mean, I probably in my lifetime growing up as a kid, heard of a violent death maybe once in my whole lifetime. Today it’s a daily occurrence, plus we have a whole news cycle. So the possibility of trauma today seems greater. Am I hitting that right?

Ed Hardesty:

Absolutely. We are exposed almost instantaneously to the effect of sin in the world and the trauma that it causes in lives of people all over the world. Previously, we didn’t know these things until months later or someone wrote a book or you ran into someone who had a story. Now it’s instantaneous and it’s on the news and they beat it to death for day after day. And the incidents in a society where the norms and nuclear family is being broken down, the incident of deeply traumatic situations is increasing more and more. It’s a wounded soul. It affects the relationships with your family. It affects your job, it affects how you look at the world, how you process information. It’s amazing because you are protecting yourself unaware and it forces you to withdraw from things. It’s debilitating unless you allow the Lord to deal with it unless you begin to have a healed heart. And I’m sorry, my experience with counselors and with psychologists and people of that nature, they are extremely gifted in explaining to you how you got into this situation and what caused the trauma, but they really don’t have many answers into how to heal a soul. Only the Lord does that.

Jamie Mitchell:

And Ed, the other thing is about PTSD is that it has some initial effects. You see things that are starting to occur, but it also spills over and begins touching other aspects of life. There seems to be a domino effect to PTSD, isn’t there?

Ed Hardesty:

Yes, and with many things in life, the Lord talks about the sins of the Father have visited on the third and fourth generation. Well, that’s not necessarily the penalty or the evil of it, but your patterned by the behavior in which you have grown up, this is normal to you, this situation when it couldn’t be more abnormal when you address it, looking at a whole person who’s not been wounded so deeply. It’s amazing how I kid a lot with my wife about this because I was talking to my grandson the other day and sayings were coming out of his mouth that my grandfather used to use. Well, where did he get them? He got them from his dad. Where did he get it from? Me? Where did I get it from my father? Where did he get it from his dad? And this pattern seems to be ever increasing in our society where the abuse and that kind of trauma, deep trauma seems to be not only systemic but passed on because of the environment it produces in which the young ones are being absolutely saturated. It’s

Jamie Mitchell:

As I was preparing for this, one of the things that really struck me was signs and evidence that maybe you have PTSD such as withdrawing from family and friends and church members having trouble sleeping, a lethargic nature, a troubling spirit of normal activities. You become distracted or distant depression you mentioned, but uncharacteristic negativity or pessimism or being self-absorbed and even leading to more addictive and self-destructive behaviors. But a lot of this just is because you’re trying to solve the pain that you’re experiencing, isn’t it?

Ed Hardesty:

Exactly right. I deal with men all the time that have solved that problem by stuffing something up their nose or in a vein or down their throat and it destroys their family, it destroys their relationship with their children. They can’t hold a job and they run away and hide in some substance or some situation that allows the pain to go away. It’s insidious, it catches you by surprise, it ambushes you with great regularity, and I have difficulty even putting it in words because it’s something that’s always with you. Even when the Lord has healed your heart, it’s still there. I think there’s a very good reason that the Lord allows those memories and those experiences to still be part of your present day understanding.

Jamie Mitchell:

The apostle Paul said a lot about capturing those strongholds, those memories, those imaginations. It is really the battleground of PTSD and that is how do I renew my mind? That probably was a big part of your healing process, wasn’t it Ed?

Ed Hardesty:

Completely. I was reading through judges and looking at Gideon and the way the 300 men took out tens of thousands and the Lord used that ambush with torches under a ceramic pot and trumpets that could be blown. Well, when you pull the pot off the torch, the oxygen once again hits that glowing wick and all of a sudden the fire breaks out and the pots are broken and the trumpets are blown and the enemy thinks they’re surrounded by an enormous number of people and the Lord just threw them into disarray. Well, what about in two Corinthians where the Lord says very clearly through the Apostle Paul, you have Christ within you to believers It is a sweet smell of fragrance, but to unbelievers it smells like judgment. And what I came to in my struggles with all this was how does Jesus who is inside of me get out?

And it took me back to Gideon. The Lord breaks the pot that way. You see, we are being crushed all day long but not killed. We’re perplexed but not despairing. We’re persecuted but not forsaken. And people begin to look at you who know you and know the experiences you’ve had and the difficulties you’ve gone through, and they say, why aren’t you falling apart again, I know you’re still troubled by all these things. It’s because the Lord has healed my heart, and he does that by breaking the vessel. That beautiful Christ is contained in this human experience.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, just like we don’t assign demon possession to any and every child because of their bad behavior, we must be very careful not to label everything PTSD, yet we need to gain understanding. We can see that this is a real issue. We must not discount it or push it off or say it’s no big deal when we return. Ed is going to help us examine how Christians have responded and how we should biblically treat this problem. Well, if you’ve just tuned in, I want to encourage you to go back and visit our website. Stand in the Gap media, that’s all one word.org and listen to this whole program and while you’re there, send the link to your pastor because today we’re looking at the topic of PTSD and how we can minister to those who suffer in the dark. Most of the time, ed Hardesty is our guest ed. Most times Christians are very leery about anything that has a psychological feel to it. That discipline is wrought with humanistic theory and certainly most do not have a biblical worldview when looking for solutions. And so we might avoid or even play off this problem of PTSD because the psychological world is always talking about it. From your personal experience having both experienced PTSD and now God using you to minister to those, what in general has been the Christian response to PTSD?

Ed Hardesty:

Pretty much there hasn’t been a response except in a few small areas. There are some programs that are extremely effective. One of them is a program called reboot, which is primarily to veterans suffering from PTSD and it’s Christ-centered answers to change their life around and heal their soul. We even go into a local prison here and talk to vets who have been incarcerated because of their inability to reestablish themselves in a civilian world. It’s amazing how when people don’t understand something, they tend to discount it and shove it aside, and you’re absolutely correct. The psychological side of this makes a lot of people scared to even touch it, but brothers and sisters that are hurting don’t need a bony finger on their face or scolding or some kind of pep talk. They need your arm around them. They need you to empathize with them. Even if you can’t sympathize with them, you don’t have to have been there.

That’s what Paul was talking about. If you have been touched by the Lord and healed in your situation, is that completer of your life and that consoler of your soul that you wish to be part and parcel of how you deal with others? The introduction to the healing savior is the best way to approach this and to walk with a brother or sister, even if you don’t understand the deepness of their trauma, to walk with them to support them. I’m convinced that James is talking about the sick brother who is burnt out by one thing or another, not necessarily a physical illness where the elders are called to gather around, to put their arms around them, give them time out to heal, and then reintegrate them back into the family of the body of Christ in one way or another. It’s a difficult thing to deal with because it is intensely personal and everyone’s a little bit different how they exhibit how it’s presented in their lives.

Jamie Mitchell:

Ed, I teach a lot on the issue of grief, and I’ve had to really study this whole subject. Grief comes from loss, and so what grief is, it’s the response that comes from some pain in our lives, but what needs to happen next is the next step, and that is mourning an expression of the loss, an expression of the grief. As I was studying this subject of PTSD for this program, it came to me that it is just a higher level of grief, a deeper grief, a more long lasting grief, but mourning and allowing people to express that mourning. As the beatitude says, blessed are those who mourn for they will receive comfort, and that’s what you’ve been talking about out of two Corinthians chapter one, that the God of all comfort comes to us, and once we’ve been comforted, we can comfort others. And as you have ministered and worked with those who are suffering from PTSD, this mourning, this being allowed to express your pain for our listener’s sake, they know somebody who is struggling. What is the posture? What is it that you can do? Putting your arm around a person coming to them to make mourning a possibility? What environment, what atmosphere do you have to create to help people allow them to mourn, especially with PTSD?

Ed Hardesty:

It is the starting point. It needs to be expressed and it will express itself in some fashion. Either you’re going to be acting out or you’re going to be facing the reality of your brokenness and the midst of that. Again, it needs a brother or sister who may not understand this situation, but understands that their brother and sister is hurting and to walk with them through it. It’s an insidious darkness in your soul. Something has died, and in order for that to become revived and to be whole again, it takes people who are willing to spend the time to prove to you and to exhibit to you that they are a safe place that your story needs to be told, and you can be safe with them if you tell your story. It won’t end up a sermon illustration or it won’t be gossiped in the local group, et cetera.

Everyone has a story and deeply wounded. People have a difficult story. They need a safe place to do it when they feel safe, when you have proven yourself to be someone who is there to hold them, to work with them, to accept them, no matter where they’ve been and what they’ve done, eventually that story comes out. Vets don’t have a problem with me once they find out that I’m a combat vet because they don’t have to explain the situation to me. I’m fully aware and they feel safe with me because they know that I know. It’s that sort of thing. There’s a children’s book years ago called The Vet Teen Rabbit, and I won’t go into the niceties of all this because it’s a beautiful story to teach the children, but all the toys in the nursery all want to become alive and become real.

And one of the little plush rabbits asked one of the other older toys, how does one become real? And the old skin horse says to him, so much wiser than anyone else. By the time you become real, most of your joints are loose, your hair is falling out, your eyes are falling out of your head. But it’s okay because once you’re real, you can’t be ugly except to those people who don’t understand. There is no program for this. It needs a brother or sister who actually cares about you and your wholeness as a person and can be on the spot Jesus in your life to accept you, to talk with you, to let you find that safe spot so that you can express your story. It is the beginning of healing. It is the expression of mourning

Jamie Mitchell:

And inviting people. Let’s say you have a person in your life and your church and your small group or in your family who you believe have gone through some deep waters in their life, maybe some type of trauma, even opening the door and inviting them to share and being a listening ear is a powerful tool to begin this process, isn’t it?

Ed Hardesty:

Most of us have not cultivated the ability to really listen. You get the impression from a lot of people when they ask you to tell your story that they’re only waiting for an opportunity to tell theirs a pause in the conversation rather than really listening to what you’re saying. And don’t be put off if people won’t open up sometimes for a long time until they understand that you really do care about them and their wholeness rather than just cultivating another story that you can relate because of some misguided sense of, I don’t know how to describe it, the people that are real and the ones that aren’t the situation where you’re safe and the ones that aren’t so safe. And it takes a while to cultivate that kind of relationship. Spend the time, love the person, let them come to the place where they feel secure. And eventually, usually at the oddest moment, little pieces begin to tumble out and they’re checking you out. They’re waiting to see if you are real. If you truly do care about them. Sooner or later, the story will be told.

Jamie Mitchell:

Ed, the two mistakes that I have to admit that I’ve made over the years is that I began to project what I thought it was and what their problem was, and then equally so rushing to find a solution for them. As I have thought about this this week, those two things, the projecting of what I think is wrong and trying to find a solution quick that kind of squelches any chance to help somebody with trauma mourn and begin to share.

Ed Hardesty:

Yes, sir. It certainly does. The upshot of all this is it takes a long time, and the irony is it never leaves you. It’s always there. But the important thing to keep in mind is that people who are broken and embrace that brokenness and only the Lord can allow you to do that, it becomes a great strength in your life because you very quickly come to situations and understand, I can’t handle this. I know where it’s going to place me. I know the dark hole that the Lord’s allowed me to climb out of, and in this situation, not my will Lord, but yours,

Jamie Mitchell:

Yes, Hey, denial of reality always ends poorly, especially with believers, but we have a truly biblical response that’s paramount for the world today. When we finish up, how can we minister to those who might be suffering with PTSD and what word do we have for pastors? Well, thank you for joining us today, and thank you to Ed Hardesty who has provided some tremendous insights and personal reflections on how believers can care for and love those who are hurting or dealing with PTSD. And before we finish up, I want to discuss how to minister in the church, but from my research, I was surprised to find that pastors made the list of those who are susceptible to being affected by PTSD. The reason was threefold. Number one, they are exposed to trauma and there’s a whole list of things. It’s a high stress job that they must perform.

I mean, I always said Sunday always comes. And then finally, the lack of support system. When they’re hurting, they need to grieve more and recover. There are a few that are there for them, like they are for everybody else. I will add one more, and that is that they’re expected to comfort and help others in that comfort even when they’re being affected. I mean, I had to do funerals of friends of mine, and I couldn’t be the one sitting in the funeral home M morning. I was performing. So have you seen PTSD in the life of pastors? You’ve been a Bible college professor, you’re a pastor yourself. How do you see this playing out in pastor’s lives and how do you deal with this differently?

Ed Hardesty:

It’s there. It’s not the same as combat, but when you’re burying people, when children are ill and you feel so helpless when parents are asking you pointed questions, why is this happening in our lives, in our family? And when it comes time in a terminal situation where people on life support for the plug to be pulled and to counsel that group that’s there, they want to know why this is happening in their life. And the question come in very heated emotional moments, and you need to be the gentle person on the scene. And you’re right, you’re the one that’s hurting as well because you’re going through this trauma with them. But I think the most important thing to remember is that the Lord will heal the heart. Give them time, create that safe place and be the person they can count on to be there.

Even if you’re just silent on the side with your arms around your brothers and sisters to go through things alone is helpful to a degree. But the support group that doesn’t poke, doesn’t prod, doesn’t preach at them or doesn’t bring them to some standard that they have not yet seen. It’s not time for that. It’s time to be compassionate and open, and especially with the brothers who have no support group around them. That’s one of the problems in ministry. Even if you’re in a large group of people that meet with great regularity outside of the church, most pastors are severely isolated in their function and their job, and they’re almost unapproachable in the eyes and the mind of most of the people. I think the best thing you can do for your pastor if it’ll allow you to do this, is to treat him as a brother on equal footing with you who has pains and sorrows and is carrying your grief and your difficulties and your sorrow. And he has no one to share that with. He has no safe place other than with the Lord be that brother or sister alongside that allows him to be real.

Jamie Mitchell:

And I had the opportunity about 15 years ago to speak to a conference of county coroners. It was the most fascinating speaking engagement I ever had. I had a corner in our church and he was hosting their statewide conference and he said, would you be willing to come and speak? And I thought, yeah, sure, no problem. The first thing that was shocking to me is I spoke to these coroners, I looked in their eyes and I could see the pain, and these were as we would find, very resilient people, but you could see in their eyes the trauma that they had seen. The second thing that was fascinating was my talk or my message that day was just one of empathy. I spoke as a pastor who has not seen the things that they have seen but have been on the end of having to care for those in trauma.

And it was my demonstration of empathy that really touched those corners that day, and many of them came up and made mention of that. Ed, we have just a few moments left today, and in that same way for our listeners, how would you help them to help someone suffering with PTSD? What are maybe two or three things that would be go-to things that they could do? And we’ve mentioned a number of them here today, but anything specific that our listeners could walk away with practically and say, you know what? If I ran across a person who I believe is with PTSD, here are two or three things that I could do to make a difference in their life.

Ed Hardesty:

Be a friend and a brother in Christ. Don’t treat them like some kind of ivory tower professional. There are times and places where that’s appropriate, but not in interpersonal relationships, especially when someone’s hurting. Understand this brother is carrying the grief and the problems of the entire body of that local assembly, and he can’t talk with you about it because he’d be betraying confidences, but he needs a safe place where he is loved, where he’s accepted, and where at least you’re seeking to understand the load that he’s carrying that requires an occasional time off that’s not on the docket and not in a contract that requires every now and then the pressing of the flesh or the arm around a shoulder. Brother, I love you. I appreciate what you’re doing. I know this is a hard job that comes with tons of responsibility. I’m praying for you. I care about you. There’s anything I can do to help. Please let me know. It’s a family, and the more you can treat them as family rather than the professional who’s supposed to have all the answers, the better off they’re going to be and the more easily they can share with you the pain on their heart without giving you specifics and betraying a confidence.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah, the pastors and people who give care to people with trauma, people who are bearing the weight of those types of things, they need a place both to decompress, but someplace where they speak to others. Maybe it’s another pastor or a counselor or a chaplain or somebody who has experienced some of these things and they’re able to open up and even relate some stories of things that they have gone through and things that they have seen, and it can make a difference. Ed, one last word. We got about 30 seconds. If there are military people out there, they can find help if they’re struggling with PTSD, what would you suggest for them?

Ed Hardesty:

Oh, by all means, find a VFW, an American Legion, talk to their service officer and talk to the chaplain. I’m a chaplain for my local post. The men will talk to me when they won’t talk to anyone else. One more thing about pastors though, brother. Ladies, please watch out for the pastor’s wife. Please open your arms to her as well. Amen. She’s bearing the brunt of it when no one’s looking.

Jamie Mitchell:

Amen. Amen. Ed, what a blessing today has been. My guess is today’s program, we’re going to help many who are suffering, but even better that we have equipped some to become triage caretakers in the church. And as I leave you today, remember, live and lead with courage. That is why we do stand in the gap to dispense the needed quality and virtue of courage for the world, for the church, for your family. See you again in 23 hours.