Your Faith Has to Survive Your Worst Day, Not Your Best Sunday

If you feel nothing when you pray, you’re probably one of two men. Either you feel like something’s missing, you don’t feel heard, and you wonder if you’re wasting your time talking to a God who isn’t really there. Or you’ve optimized everything in your life except your soul, and God has become a box you check day after day. Either way, if you wrote out your resume for God, it would mostly be a blank page, or it would look like a LinkedIn profile: impressive, but empty.

Inherited Faith Doesn’t Always Work

Recognize that some of your beliefs about God aren’t yours. They’re inherited, learned through your parents’ church, your grandparents’ church, a culture and family history that isn’t necessarily what you’ve experienced yourself. Something like 24% of men actively practice their faith, and a lot of that gap comes down to this: it’s not their own. They go to church, hear things that sound familiar, but don’t know if they can trust what they’re being offered. It’s a bumper sticker: God is good all the time. But what you actually feel is something far different, and how you interact with God is to put on a smile, go through the motions, and feel empty.

Moving From Knowledge to Experience

Here’s how that changed. Sitting outside, the ask was simple: I need to know that you love me. I need to know that you’re there. Show me something so that I know that you’re there. Then paying attention, keeping eyes open for God to show up.

Driving to a meeting one evening, a plastic bag blew out of a park, landed in the middle of the road, and spun three or four times in place before taking off, all in a few seconds, clear enough to remember every detail. That was one of a few moments where God showed up. It helped move God out of a place of knowledge and into a place of experience and relationship.

Write the Resume

One practical exercise: sit down and write out the resume of God. If you’re going to have a God of your own understanding, who is he? How would you like him to be in your life? Write out 30 or 40 characteristics, not the ones you’ve been told to believe, but the ones you’ve actually experienced, sitting in nature, watching something like that plastic bag, wherever the relationship goes deeper.

There’s a story about David, hungry, running from Saul, with nothing but the sword of Goliath, and the memory of how God had come through for him before. That’s the same principle: having your own story to reference, your own place where you saw God show up, becomes the anchor when the storms get more fierce.

You have to have a faith that sees you through the worst days of your life, not the best Sundays of your life.

This Week

Sit down and write your own resume for God, 30 to 40 ideas of the God you want in your life, based on what you’ve actually experienced, not what you’ve been handed down.

This is part of the Storm Ready Men Foundation Framework series. Next up: self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Take the free Storm Ready Assessment at StormReadyMen.com. Wives, find support at The Couple Cure.