I used to fish with a friend named Joe — a man with a deep, quiet faith who did a lot of work with recovering addicts, partly because he was one himself.

One afternoon out on the water he told me his story. In high school he had been a pitcher — good enough for a college scholarship, good enough that some pro teams were paying attention. Baseball was everything to him. His identity, his hope for the future, the thing that got him out of bed every morning.

Then in his last season of high school ball he developed severe tendonitis. Suddenly he couldn't pitch. The scholarship evaporated. The pro interest disappeared. And he told me: "Joe, when baseball was gone — life had no meaning. I didn't even want to live."

What followed were years of addiction and searching before he found his footing again — this time on something that held.

Jesus said, "When the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat against that house, it fell — and great was its fall." (Matthew 7:27) He was being honest about what happens when the thing we've built everything on suddenly gives way.

Most of us have something like that — the foundation we don't even realize we're standing on until it shifts. For some it is a career. For others it is a relationship, or a role — parent, provider, caregiver — that has quietly become the whole of their identity. There is nothing wrong with any of those things. The problem comes when they become load-bearing walls. When they go, everything goes with them. The question worth asking, before the storm rather than in the middle of it, is simply: is what I'm standing on solid enough to hold?  And if the answer gives you pause — it is not too late to shift the foundation. The rock is still there. The question is simply whether we are willing to build on it.

Prayer: Holy God, you know what we have built our lives on — sometimes better than we do. Show us where the ground is shifting beneath us. And lead us to the rock that is higher than ourselves. Amen.

‍