Above the passing sands and unsettling storms of time—God stands true. Cultural moments come and go, but only a life founded in the words and work of Jesus Christ can truly stand—not just the storm of opposition but the final storm of divine judgement. 

Brother in Christ, sister in Christ, I implore you: don’t lose your home to a passing storm. At present your pressing temptation to alter or abandon your faith feels final and inevitable, a logical and irresistible imperative to fall back or fall away which doesn’t carry options or off-ramps—and that is hard to bear. Some movement or cultural moment is storming your conscience or your core beliefs, laying siege ramps to your certainties, cutting off supply lines to the city of your soul, and somewhere you have come to believe that resistance is futile. Brother in Christ, sister in Christ, I implore you: don’t lose your home to a passing storm.

As you consider deconstruction, deconversion or even the moral dereliction of the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, may I offer to you four facts that might anchor the home of your heart and might help you to stand firm when drifting back or away feel like a foregone conclusion:

1. Now is not absolute.

Believers of all ages, but particularly young Christians are vulnerable to the tyranny of “now.” I know that you can feel like your life, locked as it is in the permanent present tense of media and messaging, is not related to what has gone before you or what might follow you—but this is a terrible illusion. Now is not absolute, and pinning your principles on the situation at present will put you in unthinkable peril. Let me tell you about two periods when “now” looked right “then,” but looked foolish later.

When I was in my late teens I enrolled for a degree in English (with some philosophy). I loved the academic challenges this brought and the wide literature it led me into. Piggy-backing on all of this intellectual material, however, was postmodernism. Long before Christians spoke or wrote about this (ad nauseam) the ideology was alive in academic circles. In lecture after lecture, seminar after seminar, the fluidity of truth claims and the subjectivity of reason were emphasised over and over again until I began to fear and question what I had been taught and what I had believed. How could credible Christianity emerge from this truth hurricane with anything intact? The answer: it did because now is not absolute. Postmodernism came and went, rose and fell, just as every intellectual movement does (normally when it makes landfall in lived experience). I didn’t lose my home to that passing storm, and I am grateful for God’s grace.

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