Why Life Can Feel Wrong Even When You Know What Matters

Bottom line upfront: I'm going to ask you one question today, and I'm going to ask it twice. How can we, (BTTB and me) as a ministry help you? Not in general. Specifically. Because I think I finally understand what a lot of you have been trying to tell me.

You can have people you love, work that matters, and a clear sense of what you want from life… and still feel like none of it fits together. You know what matters. You just can't see how the pieces connect anymore.

Last Sunday, many of you showed me exactly that. We asked where you sense the Holy Spirit leading you over the next 90 days. The answers poured out—serve, share Jesus, disciple someone. Then we asked what you actually practiced over the past 30 days on a 100-point index. Experiencing grace scored 85. Helping someone else follow Jesus scored just 51.

You know what to do. You want to do it. And it isn't happening. That's not a knowledge problem. I don't think it's a willpower problem either. When what you believe and what you do stop connecting, life stops making sense.

Researchers have a name for the thing that is missing. They call it coherence—the sense that your life holds together as one piece. I've had my team deep in a review of the literature on what builds coherence in people of faith—dozens of studies, tens of thousands of believers. Three things kept showing up, and every one of them points the same direction.

First: faith builds coherence—but not through what you know. Studies measuring how much doctrine people held showed almost nothing. Studies measuring whether faith had given people meaning and steadied them emotionally showed two to three times the effect. Knowing the Bible matters. But coherence shows up when you absorb Scripture, and it moves from your head to your hands and feet.

Second: performed faith doesn't hold. Middle-aged adults who held faith because it was expected—good people, church people—had less coherence than those who held it for its own sake. There's nothing wrong with a quiet season. But a faith you own tends to move. The Holy Spirit keeps pointing you outward because that's where an owned faith goes.

Third, and this is the one that stopped me: the strongest finding in the entire review was about spiritual struggle. People who feel distant from God, unsure He's listening, show by far the sharpest drop in coherence. And the research on coping is just as clear—coherence grows in people who face a hard thing and do something with it. Feeling it is part of that. Staying stuck in the feeling is where it drains.

I know that struggle, and I’m not just talking about when I was younger. I mean now. I'm in my mid-seventies. My career is winding down, and I'm honest enough to know the rest of it is too. I've spent my life as a Christ Follower measuring other people's spiritual formation, and some mornings I look at my own and can't see how the pieces fit. What I've built. What I didn't finish. Who I'm handing it to. What's actually next. I have every doctrine intact. The sense that it all holds together comes and goes. What keeps pulling it back isn't a better answer. It's the people who won't let me stay in my own head, and a reason to get up and serve somebody. Doing something is how the pieces find each other.

“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22).

Our own survey says the same thing. Those scores—85, 51, 66, 33—are out of 100, and they measure what you actually did in the past 30 days, not what you believe. The people who meet weekly with someone they're discipling scored 66 on helping others follow Jesus. The ones who don't scored 33. I can't prove the relationship caused the difference. But it's the biggest gap in the whole survey, and that one relationship is the clearest thing separating the two groups. It's what the Spirit has been pointing you toward. It's where your faith and your life start to fit.

Most of you are over 55. You've already watched God tie together things you thought were lost. You are not the ones to be replaced. You are the ones who can show someone younger what it looks like when the pieces come together.

So here's the question again, and I mean it. How can we as a ministry help you?

Email me at Arnie.cole@bttb.org and tell me. What's standing between you and the one person the Spirit keeps putting in front of you? Is it that you don't know how to start? That there's nobody? That you're in a struggle with God yourself right now? What would actually help—a simple way to begin, someone to walk with, an episode on the exact thing you're carrying? I read what comes back. We build what you ask for.

All in, eyes up!

P.S. On Spiritually Fit Today this week I talk to Jason Hietbrink and dive into what it really means to put God and family first. We’ll talk about practical ways to bring your best self home and truly connect with those you love