How To Have Resilience

Photo by Anish Nair on Unsplash

Thoughts after a prolonged discussion on child protection and safeguarding, a unit covered in the college course for classroom assistants.

“We need to build resilience,” said the tutor.

The words dropped down dead onto the classroom floor. No-one picked them up to put on paper. The sheer inadequacy of them in the face of what we’d been discussing for a couple of weeks seemed like trying to use hand sanitiser as an antidote for blood poisoning.

For the purpose of a written assignment on child protection, we had had to wade through the mire of news articles, timelines, case review documents and official inquiry reports, all with horrifying details of unspeakable human cruelty, unimaginable pain suffered by children at the hands of adults that left us in silence or roused us to vehement judgement.

I had struggled to hand in work that wasn’t stained with tears.

If the dictionary definition of resilience implies that we can withstand the shock or easily recover from being confronted by the depravity of human behaviour, how can we develop this capacity in order to cope with it all and not be overwhelmed? How is it possible to be resilient to what we see and hear every week on the news or even witness for ourselves. How do you become resilient to evil?

No-one that evening at college offered any suggestions.

I suppose the most straightforward strategy is to simply stop watching the news, carefully manage our social media newsfeeds, turn off the radio, and not buy newspapers (excluding frontline professionals who don’t have the luxury of the option). Or perhaps we can stoically try our best to accept the inevitability of bad things happening, adopt a kind of sympathetic fatalism but is this really resilience?

Considering what we had been researching, it seems that society’s answer is to formulate more policy, to pass more legislation, and to publish more guidance documents. We discuss, criticise and cast blame, inquiries are launched, media storms whipped up and people sacked. Does any of it prevent the human heart from choosing evil - of course not, because legal frameworks cannot save us from ourselves. Law is unable to stop sin. It cannot stop humans from choosing to walk the path of darkness.

We cannot pretend the darkness doesn’t exist, we cannot ignore the problem, we cannot use law to force it to stop and if we take the time to stop judging others, we cannot deny that it is present in our own hearts. Our attempts at resilience are ultimately futile.

When we realise that, all we’re left feeling is hopelessness and that’s what it felt like in the room that night in college, a sense of hopelessness in the face of the darkness. It’s all we have when we don’t possess holy resilience, a capacity to withstand the shock that comes only from God because surely resilience is only truly found in Jesus.

Romans 8:3 - ‘In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.’ (The Message)

It is because of the inadequacy of law and our failure to live by it that Jesus ‘entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity.’ It is because of the pain in the world caused by sin that God sent Jesus. The Son of God did not ignore or avoid evil, he dealt decisively with it head on, he shed tears because of its devastating effects on people’s lives, he ‘took on the human condition’ but he had holy resilience based on love, even to the point of death.

The resilience of Jesus does not mean avoiding the pain and the tears, it does not mean a hardening of the heart or building a callused shell to protect ourselves from the ugliness and the despair. It is not curating our world to avoid the horrors, attempting to insulate ourselves from the pain and suffering that is endured daily by countless numbers of people. Resilience is about acknowledging that we are people who walk in darkness, living in a land of deep shadow but also that there is a great light, sunbursts of light. ( Isaiah 9:2 The Message )

This light means that we can see the truth about the world and about ourselves but also the truth about the one who took the full force of sin and evil on himself and then defeated its power - Jesus’ resurrection is the proof. We can believe in the one who has conquered death, who is sovereign over the entire world and everyone in it.

God remains present to us, chooses to be in the world, continues to invite, to love, and to insist on the way of the cross. The grace of faith is what builds resilience. It is believing that life in abundance is what Jesus is offering to us. Resilience is believing that he wants to redeem this crying, limping world, heal it and restore it to glorious relationship again with the creator who loves it. Holy resilience finds beauty in the world and in people, it finds joy in the ordinary and is filled with wonder in the extraordinary.

Holy resilience embraces hope.