Are you still maintaining your integrity?

Curse God and Die!

Job 2:9

So what is your own personal Apostles Creed? It will never do to try answering this question when you are in the midst of pain and heartache. The Accuser will spin you a narrative which is easy to believe in the moment. A lie is believable when it incorporates your feelings and matches your current reality.

We must discover truth when there is no pressure to do so. This will become our filter when times get tough. Our personal creed tells us what is true, even when everything is running contrary to it. You already have a personal creed, you just need to acknowledge what it is.

Platitudes do not work when you have a child in the hospital. Church rhetoric doesn’t work when your spouse is leaving you. Job was not consoled by the so-called wisdom of his friends. When the darkness comes upon you, the only thing that can bring peace is a pre-existing certainty of the character of God. Searching for answers after tragedy has struck is like trying to find your bearings in the dark. Or to use another analogy, you can mend and attach a sail in the middle of a hurricane… but it will be difficult.

I offer to you my irreducible minimums. These are the compass bearings that guide all other facts for me. If facts in my life do not agree with these minimums, I look for further clarifications (or I surrender certainty for trust).

Or to make an analogy out of a biblical parable; these are the foundation I build my house upon. When you try to look for answers in the midst of the storm, you have built your house upon the sand.

But please do not adopt my foundation. If you do not believe these, it would be the same as building upon the sand. Instead, let these serve as a starting point for building your own foundation. Once you have this, the answer to your heartache will be, something like: “I don’t know why this is happening to me, but I do know that God is_________.”

The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. Matthew7v25