resilience

I get knocked down, but I get up again…

/ JJS / Leave a comment

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Today’s readings (click below to open in new tab/window):
Psalms 15; 147:1-11, 1 Samuel 25:23-44, Acts 14:19-28, Mark 4:35-41

Resilience, a term long used in medical circles, is becoming a staple of life and leadership coaches. For medical purposes, resilience means the ability to resist and recover from disease. In the area of personal development, it describes the ability to bounce back from stress. Either kind of resilience depends partially on traits we’re born with, but with some knowledge and effort we can positively influence how resilient we are in both senses.

Paul was a paragon of resilience. The man was nearly impossible to keep down. In Lycaonia, Paul and the other disciples won many converts among the gentiles. When Jews who were hostile to Paul came from Antioch and Iconium to Lycaonia and turned the people against him, the crowds “stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead.” But when the disciples gathered around him, he got up, regrouped, and went from city to city encouraging the disciples and appointing elders.

It seems Paul’s resilience depended on his faith and his interaction with other people. We can all draw on our reserves of resilience, but we need to learn how. For some of us that means interacting with loved ones, and for others it means time alone. Maybe it’s art. Maybe it’s running. The benefits one person gets from time in prayer and meditation may be the same benefits someone else gets from kickboxing lessons. Because we are all so different, we should be careful not to ridicule or belittle someone else’s means of stress reduction. Nor should we feel pressured to explain or modify our own to suit someone else’s expectations.

Cultivating resilience – even if it takes time away from other people’s priorities – is not selfish; it’s self care. Stress attacks the body in many of the same ways disease does, but we can build immunity. Why deny ourselves mental health exercises any more than we would physical exercise? Our ability to serve God and the Kingdom only improves as our resilience does. If we’re going to love our neighbors as we love ourselves … don’t we first have to love ourselves?

Comfort: You are part of God’s creation; treat yourself like you would the rest.

Challenge: Reflect on the ways you deal with stress and whether they increase your resilience or simply suppress it.

Prayer: Lord, teach me healthy ways to care for myself so I may be at my best to serve you. Amen.

Discussion: What helps you build resilience?

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Burying the Body

/ JJS / Leave a comment

 

Today’s readings (click below to open in new tab/window):

Psalms 143; 147:12-20; Judges 4:4-23; Acts 1:15-26; Matthew 27:55-66

Jesus was dead. His disciples, not understanding he would return, were scattered and gutted because their revolution had ended in crucifixion. The Messiah had been killed by enemies among the occupier and the occupied. The evidence of failure was his own lifeless body, hanging on a cross as the Sabbath drew near.

“What now?” they whispered. “What do we do now?”

Joseph of Arimathea and the Marys knew the simple yet devastating answer: bury the body.

Life can go so drastically wrong that we literally don’t know what to do. At these times, the best thing is often to attend to the practical. When life smashes our expectations beyond recovery, the loss can be too overwhelming to process all at once. When this is true, the momentum of responsibilities like a job, cooking dinner, and showering can keep us moving like a bicycle that will topple if it stops. Such distractions help us swallow grief in bite-sized chunks rather than a choking whole. Though we don’t want to turn these responsibilities into a form of denial, engaging in them can help us throttle the grieving process to a manageable pace. Funeral arrangements, for instance, while not routine, serve an important psychological purpose of engaging the grieving parties in activity. They draw us back into the decisions and actions of the living. While it is inevitable that we will have moments when breaking down is the right and necessary thing to do, we need a purpose to rise back up.

Short of clinical issues like depression, we all have the capacity to move on. Parents who care for children with severe disabilities are often asked, “How do you do it?” When the disability is unexpected, a parent may, in a sense, have to bury the body of hopes once held for that child. The future may hold resurrection, or an altered set of expectations, or further disappointment; in any case, these parents pull the extraordinary from the ordinary. Like Joseph and the Marys, they know the enormous healing power of being able to honestly say, “We did what we had to.”

Comfort:  In our greatest losses, God grieves with us.

Challenge: Make a list of the tasks you perform each day. Turn this into a litany of thanks: “God, thank you for the opportunity to …”

Prayer: Merciful and loving God, give me the strength to do what needs doing. Amen.

Discussion: Have you ever been immobilized by grief? What got you moving again?

Join the discussion! If you enjoyed this post, feel free to join an extended discussion as part of the C+C Facebook group. You’ll be notified of new posts through FB, and have the opportunity to share your thoughts with some lovely people. Or feel free to comment here on WordPress, or even re-blog – the more the merrier!