A Prayer for Resilience
By Jessica Van Roekel
“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” - Hebrews 10:23-25, ESV
When bad news hits, we can feel shaken. We may equate God’s love with peaceful, pleasant lives, but hard times allow us to experience his love in a new way. Trust and hope grow side by side, finding roots in God’s love. As we trust God in the bad times, our hope grows too. We grow resilient when we stand firm in faith in God and his love for us. Resiliency can be defined as the ability of a person to adjust to or recover readily from an illness, adversity, or a major life change. If a change is unwanted, like the death of a loved one or a surprise diagnosis, we can resist this change. Denial, anger, and grief are normal and healthy responses, but when we get stuck in them, they create problems with resiliency. Resiliency creates two pathways: to adjust or recover. Or as I like to say, to pivot.
Pivoting keeps the ball of one foot connected to the ground while rotating it to face a different direction. At times, God uses our unwanted experiences to get us to pivot. Often, we spend so much time wishing for what was, we miss the new direction he wants us to go or the new insight into his loving nature he wants us to know. Standing stuck means we view God’s love through the lens of our broken hearts, which creates an imperfect view of God’s love. Our new situation creates cracks, like a broken watch face, and we can’t see him clearly because of them. But when we view God’s love through the lens of the Word of God, we see a perfect love that casts out fear. We see a love that watched his son, Jesus, suffer a violent death so we might know him intimately as Father. It’s a love that gave all so we might know a hope that defies all human explanation.
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