Have you ever gone through something hard and thought you were handling it pretty well...
until you weren’t?
Maybe you kept showing up. Kept working. Kept taking care of everyone. You answered “I’m good” often enough that you almost believed it yourself.
Then one completely ordinary thing happened.
Someone asked the wrong question.
You couldn’t find your keys.
The grocery store was out of the one thing you went there for.
And suddenly you’re crying in the car thinking, What is wrong with me?
I think sometimes we have a picture in our heads of what resilience is supposed to look like.
Strong.
Steady.
Unshaken.
You go through the hard thing, learn something meaningful from it, become stronger because of it and preferably look reasonably put together while doing so.
I definitely thought some version of that.
Which is probably why something I read in a devotional called Good Overcomes stayed with me.
I actually had the devotional for a while before I really got into it. You know how sometimes something can sit right in front of you and, for whatever reason, you’re just not ready for it yet?
That was this.
When I finally opened it, the message landed differently.
What I started thinking about was resilience—not as the absence of struggle or even the ability to look strong while struggling, but as continuing to move through something even when it’s messy.
That got me.
Because I realized I was measuring my resilience by how well I appeared to be handling the hard thing.
If I was overwhelmed, maybe I wasn’t strong enough.
If I needed a break, maybe I wasn’t persevering.
If I was discouraged by something I thought I should be “over” already, maybe I wasn’t as resilient as I thought.
But why would struggling through something mean I’m not resilient?
Isn’t the struggle the very thing requiring resilience in the first place?
I think about my own life and some of the things I’ve come through, and none of them looked particularly inspirational while I was actually living them.
There were hard days.
Frustrated days.
Days I wanted things to move faster than they were moving.
Days when I didn’t feel particularly courageous or strong or anything else you’d put on a motivational graphic.
I just kept going.
Sometimes really well.
Sometimes barely.
But still.
And maybe that counts for more than we give it credit for.
Because resilience doesn’t always look like charging forward.
Sometimes it looks like adjusting.
Trying again.
Resting and coming back.
Admitting something hurt.
Changing the plan without abandoning yourself in the process.
Sometimes it’s simply getting through a season you never would have chosen and realizing somewhere on the other side that you learned how to carry things you didn’t know you could carry.
Your story may look completely different from mine.
Maybe your hard season is happening right now.
Maybe nobody else even knows it’s hard because you’ve gotten so good at functioning inside it.
Or maybe you’re frustrated with yourself because you thought you’d be handling it better by now.
I wonder if that’s where we sometimes miss our own resilience.
We look for evidence that the hard thing isn’t affecting us instead of noticing all the ways we’re continuing while it does.
That doesn’t mean we push forever.
It doesn’t mean staying in something harmful because quitting would somehow make us less resilient.
And it definitely doesn’t mean pretending we’re fine.
Sometimes resilience is having enough courage to admit that the way we’ve been doing something isn’t working anymore.
That counts too.
For me, faith has changed the way I think about this.
I don’t think God asks me to prove how strong I am by never struggling.
If anything, some of the seasons that stretched my faith the most were the ones where I couldn’t see much evidence that anything was changing yet.
I still had to decide what the next faithful thing looked like.
Sometimes that was moving.
Sometimes waiting.
Sometimes asking for help.
Sometimes simply getting through today without demanding that I also figure out tomorrow.
That feels much more honest to me than the version of resilience I used to imagine.
So if you’re in something hard right now and wondering why you don’t feel stronger...
maybe feeling strong isn’t the test.
Look at what you’ve actually been doing.
Where have you adjusted?
Where have you kept showing up?
Where did you ask for help instead of disappearing?
Where did you rest and come back?
Where are you still here, even though this has been harder than you expected?
Maybe resilience isn’t something you’re waiting to become once you handle this better.
Maybe some of what you’re calling struggle is evidence that you’re already practicing it.
Want to keep going with this conversation?
🎧 Listen to Episode 17: How God Builds Resilience Through Challenges and Setbacks →