I have been encountering some extraordinarily bad weather of late, unusual in both its severity and longevity. Perhaps things are difficult for you today, too.
The word resilience is popular in popular psychology these days, and I have been musing upon it from a Biblical viewpoint.
Resilience isn’t merely fatalism. Nor is it sheer stubbornness. Resilience is flexibility of attitude, elasticity of heart. It is the ability to take on a new shape to respond positively to a particular circumstance and then return to original form in due course.
Resilience is the ability to adapt to stressors, to maintain psychological wellbeing in the face of adversity. Resilience is going through trouble without losing your head, your heart, your identity, or your purpose.
The Bible doesn’t have a word for “resilience.” (A quick check of the four leading English translations shows zero results for “resilience” or “resilient.”) But it everywhere speaks of the qualities of character required for resilience.
The ability to change, to adapt to new challenges, should be natural for the Christian committed to following Jesus wherever he leads, to obeying whatever Jesus commands, and to accepting with thanks whatever Jesus gives.
The ability to endure, to persist nonetheless, should be natural for Christians for whom faith is the fundamental posture toward our heavenly Father, Maker of heaven and earth, who has adopted us forever into his royal family with the promise of an astounding and eternal inheritance.
The ability to recover, to get back in the saddle and get back to work, should be natural for Christians who follow a divine calling toward a glorious world to come.
Christians are thus equipped for resilience. We ought to be remarkably, even conspicuously, resilient.
We should expect trouble. We should endure evil and, when appropriate it, forgive it, even as we also resist it and replace it with goodness—albeit prudently and patiently as we have opportunity to do so.
We should maintain our poise as we maintain our orientation to the Big Picture, the Grand Story. We ought not to panic over momentary setbacks or even extended deviations from what appears to be the most direct route home. We trust God to take us where we need to go most optimally to do what we are to do and to become whom we are to be.
Resilience is at once both realistic and hopeful. Resilience reacts appropriately to the situation without surrending to it. Resilience flexes as necessary to act most helpfully—to love—without losing one’s confidence or one’s ultimate direction.
Faith, hope, and love—Christians resiliently practice all three. We pursue shalom no matter what, we seek to bless no matter what—even if that sometimes means merely staying in place while bad things happen, holding our ground and our confession and our trust in God toward the day, coming soon, when we can advance and serve once more. Resilience means looking forward with the certainty that all evil is only temporary and will yield one day to the bliss of the new earth (Revelation 21–22).
Christians therefore should be the world’s most resilient people, not brittle, flinty, fragile, over-sensitive, over-reactive, touchy, and irritable. We should not be discouraged and discouraging, gloomy, sardonic, cynical, hopeless, and defeated.
Christians should never be subservient, crippled, loudly wounded, perpetually traumatized—permanent victims and pathetic losers.
Let’s take heart from just one chapter of the Bible, Romans 8:
The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us….
In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:16–18, 37–39).
Christian resilience is empowered, sustained, corrected, and encouraged by the very Spirit of God, our Partner and Counselor and Advisor and Comforter. We aren’t resilient on our own, but instead remain strong in the strength of God’s strength (Ephesians 6:10).
I want to underscore here the importance of relying on the Holy Spirit. All this talk about resilience, about faith, hope, and love, about enduring and conquering—it all sounds positively heroic. And the authentic Christian life is hard and requires a kind of heroism.
Much of the time, however, I feel like “Fat Charlie” in Paul Simon’s song, “Crazy Love” (1986): “sad as a lonely little wrinkled balloon.” I can recover my proper shape and strength only when inflated by the Holy Breath of God. Resilience depends utterly on returning to God and reconnecting with God—hour by hour, not just “emergency by emergency.”
So adapt, O my soul! Endure! Bounce back! Keep walking!
What’s the worst that can happen? And then you die. And then you live.
For Christians, resilience has a special spelling. Remember it:
R-E-S-U-R-R-E-C-T-I-O-N
