We all go through seasons that test our resilience, some more, some less. Resilience is both a state and a process. Resilience is bouncing back, but more than that, in living systems it is also about growth and strengthening through trauma.
Research reveals that all have the attributes within them to be resilient, but not all become or remain resilient. The main characteristics that are evidenced in resilient individuals are: attitude, spirituality, problem-solving, sense of mastery, curiosity, and a survival instinct.
Which of these is most important? According to the Journal for Human Behavior in the Social Environment, “Resilience Theory” (Green, Galambos, Lee 2008) the single largest internal contributor to resilience in people is spirituality. This is were worldview comes in.
If spirituality is just a practice, with no real knowing of substance, then it is superstition, or placebo at best, and runs the risk of not being enough for the next test of resilience. If however the substance of the spirituality held in faith is solid, then the foundations for resilience extend further than placebo to a truth that will hold. Of what good is it to blindly hold a world view that, as a good friend of mine puts it, “doesn’t even a have a chance of being right?”
The materialist worldview is dead. Scientists have discovered far too much evidence of intelligent design to maintain an evolutionary naturalistic worldview. In straight language, matter did not create itself. (If you would like to understand this more, source a copy of Mind & Cosmos, written by New York University professor of law and philosophy Thomas Nagel)
The most significant testing and outcome contained within resilience is the challenge for the (re)discovery of meaning, purpose and promise (potential). In straight language, when we loose these we break, or numb ourselves to the sense of having lost them.
How we see the foundations of the world provides the foundation for our life. Perhaps this is why spirituality ranks number one as a characteristic of resilience.
If you are wrestling in a season of storm or stress in your life, take a look at your foundation. Does it provide what is needed to be or become resilient?
