Resilience – what do you think it is?  What does it look like and where does it originate in a person?  And when?

We label children as resilient, especially when we hear of a distressing situation involving a child.  We comfort ourselves remembering how resilient they are.  Even their young, green bones are forgiving, failing to break when our older bones snap rather fantastically upon seemingly benign falls.  And if a child breaks a bone, it heals rapidly.  Resilient. 

We hear about resilience in terms of war.  Men who endure capture and torture.  Many times, they emerge shockingly whole.  Bravery, strength, resilience we conclude.

And let’s not forget the resilience of women who endure years of abuse from husbands who are never suspect.  We learn of their perseverance later in a seemingly unrelated incident and marvel at all they lived through and all the while we never knew.  Never suspected.  Wow!  What strength.  Moxie. Resilience.

Resilience has been studied by psychologists for decades.  Medical thinking has always advised us that life’s adversities and stresses can cause harm to the human body.  Think of all the times you’ve been advised to reduce stress in your life for the sake of your health.  A long time ago women in particular we sent to sanitariums to “rest” from the trauma of life due to their “frail female constitutions.”

Dozens of medications have been developed to help with our anxieties and nerves.  Yet recently there have been some new thoughts about this accepted theory.  It could be that it isn’t stress that poses the risk to our health but the belief that stress is bad for us that does the ultimate harm.  It seems that there is little if any negative effects when a minor or major stressful circumstance is viewed as a challenge.  Studies conducted on executives experiencing high levels of work-related stress revealed that those who viewed the stress as a challenge rather than as a threat experienced few negative consequences.  They were resilient in other words.  In metallurgy, resilience refers to a material’s ability to bend but not break under physical stress. Resilient people are people who bend but do not break when under psychological stress.  It is a reframing of trials and trauma. 

Resilience is difficult to study because if one doesn’t experience any sort of adversity, one cannot know how resilient they actually are.  It is only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges.  A central element of resilience is perception according to George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University’s Teachers College.  He asks, “Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow?”  He coined the term “Potentially Traumatic Event” because he believes every frightening event has the potential to be traumatic or not, to the person experiencing it.  Living through adversity doesn’t guarantee that you will not suffer going forward.  What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.  Frame adversity as a challenge and you become more flexible and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow.  

Ah, but God already knew this and clued us in.  James 1:2 tells us, “Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials…”  That’s the ultimate way to reframe trials.

Christians have an inner resilience that is not their own. It’s the power of the Spirit. With that power, we can do things we could never do on our own.

If you cannot be with us in person, feel free to download the Bible study materials for your personal use by following one of these links: PowerPoint Slides, PDF File. You can also find the video of this session on our YouTube channel soon after the meeting concludes. And lastly, you could follow this link to download other studies in this series: INpowered Discipleship if you happened to miss one of our prior studies.

Yours in Christ,

Eric Glover   
The Gospels Class     
Brentwood Baptist Church