Resilience

Today I am thankful for resilience....the ability to recover from adversity...the amazing phenomenon that this too shall pass. No one is safe from bad things happening. This has been illustrated quite clearly to me this week. Sometimes we are hurt by others and sometimes we hurt ourselves. Nevertheless, at the time, it seems like things are never going to be ok again. We cannot imagine, with the tools that we have at that moment, how we will move on. But we will. We always do.

There are some famous people that come to mind...Jackie Kennedy, Dana Reeves, Elizabeth Edwards, Abraham Lincoln, Jesus (to name a few) who have shown resilience... but it is the people that I know personally that have undergone their fair share of pain and have come out on the other side normal that give me hope... Kie who lost her precious baby this week, all the many people I know who have been through divorce, the person in my small group, my friend who lost her husband, the person that is worried that their business is in trouble, the precious girls that find themselves living in an orphanage in Guatemala, Jesus, and me. I have been through what I consider a fair amount of personal crisis over the past couple of years. Maybe you have too.

And what I know now is that our lives won't be the same after crisis...they will be better. Hard to imagine at the time of the pain. At the moment of the pain, we don't have the tools to deal with whatever crisis we are experiencing...we pick up those tools along the way. Those tools are picked up from a good friend that has some advice, from some stupid mistakes we figure out the wrong way to go, from a book we read, from love shown over a good lunch with someone who loves you, from our relationship with God, from the little millimeter our hearts expand after some time.

All of the crappy yucky things that have ever happened to me and others...gives me hope. Because I (and everyone else) have always managed to come out on the other side not just the same, but stronger. Yay resilience...thank God that we don't end up on a heap on the floor with ruined lives every time something bad happens to us...