| Good Morning Everyone, Our theme for this month: “Resilience” Our Bible verse for today: “Here I am today, eighty-five years old. I am still as strong today as I was the day Moses sent me out. My strength for battle and for daily tasks is now as it was then.” Joshua 14:10-11 (CSB) Our thought for today: “Resilience is the key to a life well-lived.” At this point in our study of resilience we’re still exploring the meaning of it and why it’s important to be resilient if you want to live a good life. Yesterday I provided some descriptive words and terms to help us define resilience. They included words like flexibility, adaptability, and rebounding. When used to describe a person, “Rodale’s Synonym Finder” also includes terms like buoyant, irrepressible, jaunty, lighthearted, breezy, perky, carefree, and cheerful. There have been many good books written over the years intended to help Christians learn to live a resilient life. Over the course of this month, I’ll recommend several of them to you. Perhaps my favorite, and the one that I personally found to be most helpful, was written by former Navy SEAL and former Governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens. The title is “Resilience: Hard-won wisdom for living a better life”. Greitens writes, “Resilience is the key to a well-lived life. If you want to be happy, you need resilience. If you want to be successful, you need resilience. You need resilience because you can’t have happiness, success, or anything else worth having without meeting hardship along the way.” His point is that every life is filled with hardship, trials, and challenges. We can’t escape those things – they’re common to every life. The difference between people is found in how we handle them. It’s the old truism that “You can’t always choose your circumstances in life but you can always choose your attitude about your circumstances.” Faced with adversity some people buckle and fold; others grit their teeth and endure it – persevering through it; but a resilient person embraces the challenge, learns from it, grows through it, and comes out stronger and better. And, they might even have some fun with it along the way (buoyant, irrepressible, jaunty, lighthearted, breezy, perky, carefree, and cheerful). Caleb was a resilient person. We read a little of his story in Joshua 14:11 (cited above). He had faced slavery in Egypt; followed by a mad dash across the desert to the Red Sea as they were chased by Pharaoh’s army; followed by forty tough years of wandering in the wilderness. But still, he was upbeat and ready for the next challenge – eighty-five years old and still kicking butt and taking names. He was resilient. Resilience is the key to a life well-lived. It’s also a way of being. We’ll think more about this tomorrow. God Bless, Pastor Jim |
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