Resilience Through The Lens of Science, Gandalf, and a Thorn
If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, you won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb or do you surmount?
The good news is, resilience can be developed in unlimited quantities.
Gandalf’s Wisdom of Choice
In JRR Tolkein’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the fate of Middle-Earth rests on the shoulders of an unlikely hero, Frodo Baggins.
Gandalf the Grey and Frodo have a classic conversation about crisis. Frodo says, “I wish it need not have happened in my time." "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Resilience is in the choice to see crisis as a challenge and keep going.
Resilience is a constant calculation: Which side of the equation weighs more, the resilience or the stressors?
Three Observations From Science
Norman Garmezy, Emmy Werner, developmental psychologists and George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist met thousands of children and adults over decades of research.
The resilient children and adults:
i) had an “internal locus of control”.
ii) believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements.
iii) had a strong bond with a supportive caregiver, parent, teacher, or other mentor-like figure.
Human beings are capable of worry and rumination: we can take a minor thing, blow it up in our heads, run through it over and over, and drive ourselves crazy until we feel like that minor thing is the biggest thing that ever happened. Frame adversity as a challenge, and you become more resilient and able to deal with it, move on, learn from it, and grow.
A Thorny Issue
The apostle Paul testified of a “thorn” that tormented him. Paul was careful with his words, so torment is not an exaggeration. His deliverance from God was not in divine healing but in a divine perspective.
Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:8-10
Resilience is in the therefore. His internal locus of control – trust in a good, loving God – tipped the weight from torment to resilience.
Resilience is in the return to God.
Grace is more than “suck-it-up” sufficiency. Grace is the strong bond of support of Christ and community.
For Christ’s sake is a Christian’s sacred motivation.
God’s power turns despair to delight.
Gandalf, science and faith agree on one thing: perspective, how you see the crisis, is the crisis. When your internal locus of control is surrendered to God, weakness becomes resilience and Jesus is glorified.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-secret-formula-for-resilience
Bob Jones is the founder of REVwords.com, an author, blogger, and coach with 39 years of pastoral experience. Bob is also an Advance Coach with the ABNWT Resource Centre. You can connect with Bob here.