Resilience In Response to Loss

Resilience is the buzzword of much popular psychology in this multi-speed world economy of affluence and lack and all between.

Resilience—as a concept—is not wrong, but it’s often used tastefully and in clichéd form. But the long and short of all effective life is resilience—if we aim to make sense of our losses.

Sure, we can choose to be ignorant of our losses if we like, but we will only be fooling ourselves. And giving credence to our losses is not about choosing to remain locked in the quagmire; it’s about choosing to acknowledge before letting go, through resilience.

Loss in the Nature of Life

Beyond the wins and satisfactions of life there are losses and many rejections. Every life has them. Taking the good with the bad, as the cliché would have it, is the role of the resilient; to not only survive, but bounce back and thrive!

It’s no use pretending we are unaffected, though, just as it is a waste of time and effort to languish, year after year, in the weight of our loss (though some losses may take that long to fully recover from). Sometimes it’s best, in absorbing losses, to simply be prepared. Each day may indiscriminately bring loss.

Where we want to be is impervious to the losses as far as they might disable us.

There is a fine line. Some losses will, for a time, disable us. But where there is that ever present voice within us, calling us to fight on, we have a way for eventually bouncing back. Where we feel urged on, despite our opposing weakness, we do remount our horse. We do continue on.

Perhaps the greatest thing having learned about loss, and having developed the perseverance known to resilience, is we don’t shirk the everyday loss involved in living life. We bear these everyday losses much better, and much more patiently, than we used to.

How beautiful that God has created a thing called “resilience” that we may grow into. That, through practice, we might be lovingly stoic; not depriving ourselves or any other of God’s grace in living through many difficulties.

This is why suffering and loss are not bad in themselves; they teach us how to bear adversity and how to grow in resilience. See, God is making good of all bad! We cannot become strong through our weakness unless we experience and, therefore, endure our weakness.

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The losses we suffer teach us to endure. God blesses us with resilience in response to our obedience. We learn much more about resilience from our losses than our successes. Praise God that good is made from bad.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.