Who doesn’t love a rise and fall story? We love a happy ending. Happy endings allow us to leave a story behind with a warm glow; we can walk away with a satisfaction. This is why testimonies and fairy tales bring us a scent of hope. Without the happy ending the story isn’t closed, something in our very make up tells us this isn’t complete yet. We were built for a satisfactory conclusion; we were in fact made for resurrection. Resilience and fortitude are not the happy endings in themselves but they are the means by which we reach them. Without them the story never reaches its satisfaction.
Acts 14:19-20 (NRSVACE) “But Jews came there from Antioch and Iconium and won over the crowds. Then they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead. But when the disciples surrounded him, he got up and went into the city. The next day he went on with Barnabas to Derbe.“
You have to marvel at St Paul’s resilience. He refuses to give in doesn’t he? Left for dead, no one would have blamed him for using that left over strength to run away and never return to that place again, but he doesn’t. He shows such grit that I have to gasp, and I admit, question the wisdom of the decision, but mostly in total awe of his refusal to be defeated. The mother in me begs him to pull out at this point, but the Christian in me is cheering him on. ‘Come on Paul you can do it, the world needs to hear your message, in fact Paul, I need to hear your message’. We have so much to learn from this incredible convert about resilience.
Let’s look for a moment at St Paul’s list of trials..
Was put in prison, three times recorded in scripture,
Was flogged an uncounted number of times
Faced death over and over
Received 39 lashes from the Jews
5 times Was beaten with rods
3 times Was stoned
1 time Was shipwrecked
3 times Spent a day and night in the sea
Was in danger from his own countrymen, as well as the Gentiles
Was weary and in pain often, without sleep
Was often hungry and thirsty, cold and naked
Fought with himself, with his own weakness..his “thorn”
If this was your C.V. you wouldn’t call yourself a success would you! But after each trial Paul gets back up. The reason he is a canonised saint and hugely reverered in the church is because despite this horrendous list, he continued on until his Martyrdom. Thousands of people were brought the good news because St Paul loved and trusted enough to get up and try again, to keep putting one worn sandal clad foot in front of the other.
I think we often fall into the trap of comparing our struggles with others. We can look at St Paul and feel that our own failures seem insignificant. This works either way, it can kick us up the behind or just deepens the sense of failure that we don’t want to get back up and carry on after a much smaller trial. It is so much easier to justify our wallowing if our trials are so much worse than the other story. “Yes but they didn’t have the financial worries on top!” “At least they had a solid family to fall back on”. There are 101 reasons to justify remaining where we are face down on the floor. Circumstances are a non-confrontational scapegoat when we most need one.
There is a mind-set that is often instilled into us from a young age, “there’s always someone much worse off than you” I think it rarely brings any comfort and it doesn’t in truth help us to grow in fortitude, grace or trust and especially not joy. How could someone’s deeper level of misery help me to recover my joy? Comparison is rarely a friend, we each bring our own experiences and story to a bad situation and those are as unique as the circumstances you find yourself in. We can be inspired hearing the story of someone overcoming even worse odds, it can speak to us of hope, but something needs to switch on internally first. There will be for each of us that one thing that helps us grasp the desire to get up off the floor. The only thing we do have in common is that God is the one who will provide it.
What is Resilience, Fortitude, strength and courage?
Perhaps it would be helpful to distinguish the difference between Strength, Resilience, courage and fortitude. They can all get muddled into the same definition and we can miss those subtle nuances that help us understand the fullness of the gift. Strength This can be physical, emotional or spiritual. We understand physical strength, it’s an ability to lift, move or resist heavy things. It is an inbuilt power. Spiritual strength is the same, an inner power to move or withstand opposing forces. Sometimes that opposing force is us or Satan and if things aren’t rightly ordered in our lives it can even be God himself we are resisting. Strength is the power not to yield to something against our will. Where do we gain our strength from? Where all things come from…God HIMSELF is our strength[1] as the psalmist succinctly puts it. We are given it freely; how we use it or dispose ourselves to access it is down to our ability or desire to respond. Fortitude (Godly courage) This is use of the power or strength in the middle of the storm. The power to choose the storm, if it is the right thing to do. Fortitude is godly courage, as a virtue it gives us the resolution to persevere in what is right even if it is hard, or painful, even when we may be certain of failure. As one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit it gives us a supernatural ability to keep walking into those trials when all about us are running for the hills if that is the action that glorifies God. In my experience it’s rarely God who sends the storms, we create them ourselves or they come as an attack from the other one to weaken our resolve.
God does equip us with his grace to stand firm in the storms though. This spiritual gift chains up our fear and mistrust when it is most going to hinder Gods work in us.
Resilience
Resilience isn’t using the strength to resist failure, trial or change but accessing that strength to stand back up if we’ve been knocked down or after having stood in the face of it. It is using the battle we have found ourselves in as an opportunity for renewal, to spur growth and creative adaptation. Resilience comes in after the fight. It is the demonstration Paul gives us by his walk back into the city.
Before the mission house collapsed I had a very vivid and intense dream. I was standing on an unknown beach; there were many others around although it wasn’t crowded. I swung around to face the horizon just in time to see a Tsunami sized wave about to engulf me. I instinctively drew a deep breath and crouched down into a ball; the wave came over my head but didn’t seem to really touch me. Realising it had passed over I kept trying to take another deep breath in case there were more waves to come, there were no more waves, and as I eventually stood up and looked around I realised everything had been swept away. I was standing alone on the beach but the startling thing was, my body was merely damp. It wasn’t saturated as you would expect. I think this was a great God given illustration of Fortitude and resilience. On my own strength I would have been washed away as all the others on the beach, but in Him, in His strength I was impacted but not irreparably wounded. My faith is perhaps shaken but not destroyed, even if our physical body takes the brunt of some friendly fire.
Our friend St Paul puts it beautifully when he says “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”.
4. Why do we need them?
“If I should fall a thousand times a day, a thousand times a day I will begin again” Venerable Bruno Lanteri
We don’t live in a world where we can escape trials, or failure. We are still a long way from the garden as a human race. Ever since the day our ancestors looked back at the angels guarding the gate, we have lived in a place of testing, trial and spiralling sin. These trials are unavoidable while we are still this side of the gate. We need fortitude to stand strong in the face of trials bravely, to not run away as soon as things get tough. We need to be brave enough to stand up for what is right, not to fold the moment some cultural pressure attempts to sway us off course. We may well fail at our task but our integrity and our sense of worth are held onto. An interior strength in the face of challenge to know that the trial will end at some point and to keep walking forward till we see the tunnels opening.
We need resilience when we have reached that tunnel end. Often it is after the trial when we are clear of the immediate danger that we drop. When the adrenaline that has kept us walking forward has ebbed. Then we need the strength of Character to get back up and start walking again. Not to stay in the place of failure. Not to give up on life, God, your purpose or your mission. The story only has a happy ending if we get up and finish the story. The football team that are five nil down at half time will always be five nil down if they don’t go back on and fight till the end of the match. Only then can we say I gave it all I had.
If you have not reached your happy ending then God is not done with you or your story. Are we really meant to get up and go again at the same thing that failed? Not always no, as we have mentioned, sometimes a failure is God himself saying Stop! This is something that has to be carefully discerned and we will reflect on that later. I think the answer most definitely though, whatever the circumstances is that we don’t give up on Him! That we do pick ourselves up or more importantly let the Lord gently help us to our feet, the story never ends like this unless we choose it too. He will give you the means to stand strong in Him if you permit him to. If you turn your back on your only real hope then the story may well end badly. No beauty from ashes tale to share if you hold those ashes so tight they choke you. How much better to be as St Paul taking comfort that he ran the race to the end,
Some encouragement from the saints
If you find comfort in the stories of those who have overcome enormous trials there is a rich history to feast on. St Monica was the patient mother of St Augustine. St Augustine was a challenge for his Christian mother, children out of wedlock, odd bit of debauchery, your regular wild child. St Monica prayed incessantly for his conversion and the conversion of her husband. No betting man would have put money on the conversion of either but she didn’t give in and the rest of the story becomes a huge part of our history as a church. The church is full of Martyrs whose witness to standing strong in the face of the fiercest opposition shows us that supernatural strength is possible. To the point of handing over one’s life to defend truth. It isn’t always so dramatic or seen, and often those small acts of resilience and fortitude are just as heroic. The wife who day in, day out nurses her sick husband, the mother who gets up night after night to comfort her child, the husband who works long hours in a drudge job to ensure his family are fed. The teenager who suffers taunts and offenses because they won’t go along with the crowd. I was once told a very moving story about an encounter at a retreat; a mother was sat at the back of the hall, a small baby cradled in her arms whilst the younger children took part in the retreat. The child was the result of an affair of her husband, the birth mother of the baby, an addict was unable to care for the child so the infant was taken home by this lady. That is heartbreakingly heroic, the commitment to her marriage vows, her family and a stranger’s child, when no one in the world would have blamed her for walking away. She reconciled with her husband and with prayer learned to love and raise this child.
This is Fortitude and the continual acceptance of the situation is Resilience not to fold when everything earthly says you can, when it is only a whisper from God that says please, please do this. Sometimes that resilience is shown merely in prayer. When it feels fruitless or dry.
When you wonder if anyone is listening, and yes those moments when you doubt God. If you call on his name for the strength to take just the next step, then the next one is going to be easier. Maybe every one of those first 10,000 steps feels hard but you are so much further on from the place where you fell. Christ knows how this feels; He himself fell three times on the way to the cross. He knows exactly how it feels when every bone in your body screams give up, but your heart says just one more step. He is now right beside us in those very moments, willing us to get back up, calling us on.
Just one. More. Step.
Fortitude is the virtue of the martyrs and saints, and that same power is available to you. God knows your limits; he will not take you beyond them even if you think the boundary should have been six miles back.
How do we grow in it?
They are spiritual gifts, so truly it is not up to us. What we can do though is respond to the opportunities to grow in them. Make the choice to keep going in situations which maybe seem impossible but you know you have been called to do. Those small trials that we quickly get up from or stand firm in are good grounding for the bigger ones that come to us all at least once in our lives. Each time we defeat a sinful temptation we are strengthened in resolve and confidence for the next one. Each time we choose not to give into fear we are a little more adept for the next fearful encounter. Eventually we are freed from so many opportunities that would have in the past chained us down and held us captive. We have the building blocks to choose well and to choose wisely because of that power within us to resist all that is not of God. More often than not it is a slow building up of the virtue by the slow wearing down of the sin and fear. Make those wise stands when you can as often as you can.
Grace builds on grace. Fasting, self-denial and self-discipline are good ways to strengthen our resolve, to dispose ourselves ready for the supernatural virtue that God will give when we need it. Small acts like getting up in the morning on time, being persistent and faithful to that prayer time, sticking to the Friday fasts even though the whole world smells of Bacon. Have that awkward conversation about your faith, make that brave sign of the cross and say grace when dining under those golden arches! Small acts of bravery and faithfulness are for the win.
If you were now thinking I will now take on that bungee jump without a helmet to show my courage, stop right there. We don’t improve by reckless and dangerous pursuits that risk our lives. Thrill seeking is just that and not to be confused with that inner strength and power that comes from God. The more opportunities we are given to trust in God, to be humble, to submit to his will the more we will grow that backbone of indestructible grace.
How does failure give us Resilience and Fortitude?
Trees that grow in harsh and exposed conditions put down the deepest roots. They anchor themselves in a way that a tree in a sheltered garden will never do. Failure exposes us to those winds that makes us grip a little stronger, deepen our roots a little further. Plants that live in areas of little rainfall build systems to adapt, for storage and reserves. Nature shows us a glimpse of Gods design. The strongest most resilient plants are often growing in the most inhospitable circumstances; these are the ones that survive a storm. God cannot take away every trial and suffering in the world without removing our free will. This is the essence of where and how we are called to love Him. Therefore until the end of this time comes we will experience hardship.
What Our Lord can do, however is equip us to survive it, to withstand any onslaught. This one season of Failure gives us these virtues in ways that years of comfort and success will never do. You are riding the express virtue train my friend….as long as you choose to get back up. Just like the plants and trees adapting, we learn coping strategies and even ways to avoid temptations and storms that we know our roots are not yet strong enough to withstand. Those failures that shake us badly serve to send a signal we need to deepen our roots, strengthen our hold and trust we will have all we need to stand firm.
Jeremiahs prayer of confidence “ Lord, you are the one who protects me and gives me strength; you help me in times of trouble. Nations will come to you from the ends of the earth and say, “Our ancestors had nothing but false gods, nothing but useless idols. Can people make their own gods? No, if they did, those would not really be gods.”Jer: 16:19
[1] (Psalm 46:1; 73:26)