The Person Who Does Everything Right

You don't have a faith problem. You have faith — that's not what's missing.

What nobody gave you was a way to bring faith into the rest of the week. This is what that looks like.

You came back to church, or maybe you came for the first time. Something broke open the life you'd been living, and you walked through a door you hadn't opened in years, maybe decades. Maybe ever.

You didn't do it halfway, either. You joined a small group. You have a quiet time in the morning. You read. You go to the class on Wednesday night. Maybe volunteer on Thursday night. By any reasonable measure, you're doing the thing.

You're not doubting whether God is real, and you're not drifting or angry or checked out. You believe. You have faith.

But something is off, and it's been off long enough that you're starting to wonder if the problem is you. Sunday is one thing. By Monday morning you're somebody else — dealing with the same problems, except now there's a new layer. You came back to faith partly because something big happened, and somewhere in the back of your mind you expected things to start getting better. They haven't really. If anything, they seem heavier than before.

I know that person because I was him for more than a decade.

I came to faith in my early fifties and thought I gave it everything I had from the beginning. Whatever the commitment looked like, I was doing it. Church, community, prayer, study, volunteer ministry: I took all of it seriously and I kept showing up.

Then I'd get in my car Monday morning and I'd drive to work, and whatever had happened on Sunday stayed somewhere behind me. It wasn't gone, but it didn't accompany me in the meetings, or into my decisions, or into how I treated the person making my day difficult.

I kept assuming I was doing something wrong, or not doing enough, or not doing it the right way, this new way, so I added more. More just made me frustrated. Kept me wondering. And the gap stayed where it was.

People in this situation tend to reach for the same explanation: I just don't know enough yet. I'm just not doing it right.

And that makes sense. It's the honest response of someone who takes something seriously. If it isn't working, you learn more. You read more, take the next class, sign up for the next study. You treat faith like a subject you haven't mastered yet.

Learning matters, and I'm not knocking it. But I spent more than ten years adding knowledge while the gap stayed right where I'd left it, and eventually I had to admit that more information wasn't going to close it. I was already informed. What I didn't have was a way to carry Sunday into Monday.

Nobody had ever shown me how that worked. The people around me weren't bad teachers. In fact, they were very good ones. But nobody had told me that was even the question.

You've probably heard the word vocation in church. Sometimes it's calling, or, if you've read Rick Warren, purpose.

For many of us, those words seem to belong to someone else: pastors, missionaries, people who sold everything and went somewhere. The unspoken assumption is that serious faith is full-time, professional faith, like a pastor's life, and there is nothing else. And if there is something else for you, it's just life you manage between Sundays.

I bought that assumption for years without knowing I'd bought it.

It took me a long time to see that the assumption isn't in the Bible. The men in the Bible who did the most with their faith mostly didn't have religious titles. They brought their faith to work on a Tuesday and let it be visible there.

I'll come back to that. For now I just want to put words to something you may already feel.

You're doing everything (almost) right and the gap is still there. The advice you've been given — learn more, pray more, wait — is loving, and it isn't wrong, but it doesn't tell you what to do at eight o'clock on a Monday morning.

That problem has an answer, and it isn't the one most people are talking about. It's what this series is about. If you've been living with that gap and not knowing what to do with it, s.