Resilience: The ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens.
…this too shall pass.
For me, this season of my life started with the end of a relationship to someone who was physically abusive and battering, psychologically abusive and controlling, and finally being told that they were using me for what I was providing and not about love or relationship.
Can some of you relate?
Going through the stages of grief, I remember immediately rationalizing the words I was hearing and entering the isolation and denial phases. Justifying how I was being treated. Still wanting to bargain my way back into the good I had. Wanting that “peak” one last time; yet still wanting to ignore the “valley”.
Can more of you relate now?
Then it hits you… free falling out of control, slamming into the earth, and your life shattering into a thousand pieces. You stand up and realize that you see nothing as far as the eye can see and it hits you. Fear, desperation, anxiety, loneliness, rejection, loss, failure.
…but this too shall pass.
How then, after all of that do we aspire for resiliency when most mornings we can’t even will ourselves out of bed, or find our car keys?
Psalm 71:14 says “But I will hope continually, and will yet praise thee more and more.”.
Every morning I wake up and hold the pieces of my shattered trust and heart in my hands, abandoned in that field, and I look up at God and I ask him to please put them back together and help the scars heal. Every day I ask for him to protect me and have my back because I have realized that no one on this earth can do so as he does.
It will take many years, and some of these wounds will never go away, but I’ve realized that what >I< need to do (and have done) is just surrender. I have full peace in just giving my path to God and letting him decide what this next season of my life is going to be like.…will this pass?
Endurance: The power to withstand pain or hardship; the ability of strength to continue despite fatigue, stress, or other adverse conditions.
Endurance.. an equally necessary part of grieving to be able to achieve resiliency. Without endurance many of us will give up. The lesson I learned this week is very simple. You can’t run from the pain, you can’t numb it, you can’t mask it. You have to be willing to take the gloves off and get into that ring and fight it out. Fight with all the heart you have until you’re done with the pain, and it’s done with you.
Otherwise, if you give up, or aren’t ready to put in the work and heart, the pain will win, and you will be stuck under it’s heel for the rest of your life.
It starts with the heart.. Trauma slashes deep into the heart, leaving behind profound and permanent wounds. Psalm 6:3 “I am sick at heart. How long, O Lord, until you restore me?”
I’m plagiarizing this but it’s very profound and worth spreading.
5 ways to build resilience when your heart is broken:
ONE: Be trusting. Take it to the One who can mend your heart. Psalm 62:8 “O my people, trust in him at all times. Pour out your heart to him, for God is our refuge.”
TWO: Be self aware. Know your limits and your needs. Advocate for yourself.
THREE: Be Patient. Healing takes time.
FOUR: Be authentic. Embrace the pain, don’t RUN from it.
FIVE: Shift perspective. Learn to see the bigger picture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWH4VREXFFs <-- This entire point is personified in these 3 minutes and 28 seconds..God bless all of us who are surviving. Some days we want to give up on life itself. But in those days, give it your very best and don't give up until you have nothing left.…This too shall pass…