Last week I wrote about a particular kind of man: the one who's trying to do everything right and still can't close the gap.

He goes to church on Sunday, shows up to small group, does his morning reading, and he means all of it. But when Monday morning comes, whatever happened the day before stays behind him in the parking lot. He drives to work and something switches off. He still believes it and he still intends to live it. But he just can't seem to bring it with him.

I said that gap has a real answer, and I want to start getting into it today. First, though, I have to say something that took me a long time to understand.

When you're doing everything right and something still isn't working, you may conclude that you're doing something wrong, or not doing enough. That you're not disciplined enough, not consistent enough, not committed enough. So you add more. You stay later in the study. You get up earlier. You try harder to apply what you heard on Sunday when Tuesday arrives.

That's what I did for a long time. And the trying wasn't the mistake. But the diagnosis was. I was treating a map problem like a performance problem.

Please allow me to explain. Let's say someone hands you a map and tells you this is how the city is laid out. You follow it faithfully every day, and you still can't get where you're trying to go. There are two possible explanations. Either you're not following the map well enough, or the map is wrong.

Most of us, when we're failing at something we care about, reach for the first explanation. We assume the system is correct and we're the variable. In most of life that's a reasonable assumption. If the map has worked for other people, it's probably not the map.

In this case, though, I'd argue the map really is wrong, or at least incomplete. And what's missing from it is doing a lot of damage to a lot of well-meaning men.

Nobody ever said it out loud, but the map I was following went something like this.

Life has two parts. There's the sacred part: church, prayer, Scripture, small group. Then there's regular life: work, family, finances, the drive home, the hard conversation with a colleague, the decision you have to make on Friday that nobody at church will ever know about.

God lives in the sacred part. But regular life is where you manage things.

Your job as a person of faith is to fill up on God-things during the sacred hours and carry that fuel into the rest of the week for as long as it lasts. Sunday fills the tank, and Monday starts burning it down.

I absorbed that map without knowing I had. Then I wondered why I was always running on empty by Thursday.

Slowly, after a lot of frustration and a lot more careful reading than I'd done before, I've come to believe this map isn't in the Bible.

The divide I was living by, between sacred and secular, between Sunday and Monday, isn't something Scripture draws. We inherited it from somewhere else.

I won't get into the full history of where it came from right now. I'll just say that when I went looking in Scripture for the line that sorts life into the God part and the everything-else part, I couldn't find it. I found Psalm 24 instead:

"The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it." Psalm 24:1 (NIV)

It's not a complicated verse. But think about what it is really saying.

Everything in it means more than Sunday morning, the quiet hour before work, or the moments when I was consciously trying to be a person of faith. It covers the Tuesday morning meeting, the negotiation that went sideways, the money decision I wasn't sure about, and the person at work I was writing off. All of it is on God's map. None of it sits outside his territory.

I know that might sound simple, maybe even obvious. But consider what it means for the "gap" we've been talking about.

If the whole week belongs to God, as a real and present claim and not just an idea, then the goal isn't to import faith into the workweek. God is already in the room on Monday. What's left for me to figure out is how I am showing up.

That doesn't answer the whole question. There's still a lot to work out. But it changes the starting point in a way that matters.

If the gap exists because I'm not performing well enough, the answer is to perform better, and I've been down that road. If it exists because I've been working from a map that drew a territory God never drew, then trying harder won't fix it. I need a new map.

So before the next post, try this. Take a blank page and draw a line down the middle. On the left side, write God's part.On the right, write My part.

Then do an honest inventory of your week. Sunday service, small group, and morning prayer go on the left. Keep going from there: the 9am meeting, the negotiation you're grinding through, the budget decision nobody at church will ever know about, the person at work you've been writing off. Put each one somewhere.

When the list is done, take each item in the right column, hold it up against Psalm 24:1, and ask whether it really belongs there.

Most of what's in the right column won't hold up. When it doesn't, you'll be looking at the map problem on your own page, and that's where a new map starts.

Next time, we'll look at what that map actually looks like, and at the men in Scripture who were living it long before anyone called it a calling. Come back next week.