I trust you’ll enjoy this excellent practical article from the most recent Quiet Waters Compass magazine by my friend Hud McWilliams. The article has been condensed for brevity.
Resilience: the ability to bounce back, spring back, and recover from difficult conditions.
Resilience can be learned and developed. When we are bent, stretched, or compressed, resilience allows us to recover. This is different from being flexible, which is where we bend and don’t break, but we are not able to leap back. Another construct that is often confused with resilience is the ability to be adaptable, where we are elastic and pliable but once again unable to bounce back…
Why do some people grow through diversity and tough times and others crumple? All agree that resilience is needed, but the routes to access this coveted quality are myriad.
Trust is the essential key in resilience.
Trusting that when life goes south God is still at work in the midst of shifts and changes. Trust is so tricky; we all think that we know trust, yet when we are tested by some demanding circumstance we often discover how thin this trait is.
Many popular writings about resilience list the ability to be optimistic as necessary. The problem here is that optimism and pessimism take the same mistake by distorting reality, albeit in opposite directions. What we are left with is a hope based in the air.
It seems to me that real hope reflects the fundamental characteristic of not blinking when looking at reality. Hope is tied to this ability; eyes wide open bringing everything to the light while knowing that we are only responsible to get up again one more time than we get knocked down. Out of this hope and trust come three characteristics that form the core of resilient person.
The first capacity is to accept and face reality.
We train ourselves how to survive before we ever have to do so. It is preparation and training to not be surprised by how absolutely crazy life is in a fallen, broken, marred world. Dinners and losers, from what can see, are all through scripture alongside instruction to not grow weary nor lose heart. On what basis you may ask? Well, the resounding answer is that hope is based on seeing beyond what we can see. It is what walking by faith means.
The second capacity that resilient people possess is an ability to find meaning in life.
With poorly formed values, meaning in life will remain illusory. True values like grace and relationships should main stable over a lifetime in resilient people. These very things are used as scaffolding in times of trouble. Knowing what you believe matters!
The third building block of resilience is the ability to improvise, the capacity to solve problems without the usual or obvious tools.
This means that you can see and imagine beyond the limits of our experience. We often highly value experience as the best or strongest teacher, but scripture is given to us so can learn from revelation and not just via experience. Too often experience limits our perspective to what we have participated in and thus prevents us from seeing what is possible. This capacity means that we view life through different, larger, and more malleable lens…
Shame is somehow related to a lack of resilience because it shuts us down and then we cannot see what may be, only what is. In short were defeated by our own perception. Reaction is another facet of this characteristic since we are then functioning on automatic pilot and not in fact, responding to the reality we find ourselves in. Denial plays a major role in this entire deceptive process.
Perspective is where this endeavor of earning and acquiring resilience is grounded.
In Romans 12:2 Paul tells us we are not to be conformed to this world. It takes a lot to resist the onslaught of media and technology where more information acts as a dulling agent for the access to truth.
The text also tells us we are to be transformed into resilient followers of truth incarnate. The product of Romans 12 verse 2 is this life-rooting point of view. Sarah Young writes in Jesus Calling,
“If you encounter a problem with no immediate solution, your response to that situation (based on your perspective) will either take you either up or down. You can lash out at the difficulty, resenting it and feeling sorry for yourself. This will take you down into the pit of self-pity. Alternatively, the problem can be a ladder, enabling you to climb up and see your life from God’s perspective.”
Maybe a helpful way to begin to apply some of this to our lives is to think about the basis of resilience as not a stubborn powering up, but of self-regulating. This means that am personally responsible for my choices and thus do not remain a victim and can refrain from blaming. If I can self-regulate, then I will find that this includes self-confrontation, self-disclosure, and the ability to live with discomfort. This is a truly resilient perspective.
Hud McWilliams, MA,Ed.S., Ed.D
