resilience (noun): the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
If you work in a corporate environment or even work in any job that's generally stressful, you'll be familiar with resilience. Organisations all over the world are constantly training and developing their staff to build mental/personal resilience in order to overcome the challenges that cannot be avoided in and out of work. Resilience is what got most of us through the 2020 pandemic and any other challenge we're faced in our lives. The ability to look back on those difficult periods and laugh/smile at the lessons we learned is something we've earned. We paid a price to be able to look back fondly at those memories. Lots of tears usually, swearing to throw the towel in and then picking yourself back up to keep going.
When things get tough spiritually, the same principles of building resilience tend to work but with the same key ingredients we use in our spiritual lives daily. Developing spiritual resilience does not happen overnight. It also does not happen by our own strength or doing. We are given the grace to be resilient and to persevere. Here are some of the things we can do ourselves to build that resilience mindset:
Know your weakness and limitation: now, I'm not asking you to talk yourself down and talk yourself out of reaching higher. What I mean by this is, you need to recognise that you don't reach those high places in your own strength but rather, through God whose "power is made perfect in ... weakness." 2 Corinthians 12:9
Know your God: sometimes, in order for us to even know what our weaknesses and limitations are, we must know God and learn to rely on Him. When those storms come, God sees the end of that storm better than you and so is the best person to guide you out of it. Once you've recognised that it's not you, trusting God to pull you up when you're weak is much easier.
Acknowledge God's power: once you've acknowledged the power of God, you need to know that you have access to that power, according to your level of faith. Your faith will lead you into certain rooms and situations you won't even believe or have ever imagined!
Finally, doing all of these things doesn't just work one time. You have to make up your mind to do these things over and over again because practice makes perfect. As you exercise your spiritual muscles, you get stronger and you can flex harder! Jesus admonished HIs disciples for crying out to Him when the storm came. Even after all the time they'd spent with Him, they still didn't get it. God wants you to get it. That's why certain things repeat themselves; God wants you to learn and grow stronger because He'll take you somewhere that can only be reached where others have given up.
Leave a comment below and share you own experience of how you've developed resilience over the years. What's the one thing God always reminds you of?