It’s easy living a “Christian life”—which in most of America means I don’t drink, cuss, smoke or chew, or go with girls who do…too much. Anyone can refrain from the things that “Christians” don’t do. For the most part, it’s simply living a more or less healthy, more or less moral life.

But that’s not what being a follower of Jesus is about. Christianity is not defined by the things we don’t do. In fact, as an indicator of whether I am spiritually okay with God, the things I don’t do are mostly worthless. There is far more to life than simply avoiding negatives.

Anyone can live this sort of Christian life under two conditions: first, if things in your life are pretty much going your way, and second, if you accept a definition of Christian that is grossly watered down and bears little resemblance to anything in scripture.

But what about people who don’t want to live on baby food—there actually are some—and the times in life when it seems nothing is going your way? What about those whose hearts long for substance in life, and who can write a book about living in despair, struggling with depression, wondering if God has forgotten them? How do they know if they are doing well or falling flat, especially when everything in them screams, “Failure”?

You have perhaps heard the line in the detective story, when the bad guy says the cops got nuttin’ on him: “It’s all circumstantial. I means nothing.” Circumstantial evidence is evidence derived from interpreting circumstances. And circumstantial evidence in life, as in crime fiction, is unreliable. We should not trust it. Our circumstances lie.

Someone once said, teaching about Job and his faithfulness in the most trying of circumstances, “If Job teaches us anything, it’s this: The fact that your life is falling apart doesn’t necessarily mean that you are doing something wrong. In fact, it might mean that you are doing something right.”

Focusing on circumstances is a dangerous way to live. Our situations are not reliable indicators, because we can see them only from an extremely limited perspective. We can’t see the big picture. It’s also dangerous because it takes our focus off of God and moves it to ourselves and what’s happening to us. It’s certain that our trials and problems look far different from the other side of the sky, where true reality is evident. We can’t see from there, so wisdom suggests that we trust the one who can.

In hard times and in easy times, it is not our task to measure how we are doing. We are not to be engaged in continually trying to take our own spiritual temperature, to measure our own productivity. We can’t do it. Our task is simple: Be faithful. Trust God. Wait on him. This is the lesson of Job: do not deny God. Our focus and our certainty of coming successfully through trials, is in trusting God, remaining focused on him, and waiting for him to bring us through to the place he has prepared for us.

It’s up to him to decide if we are healthy or not.