Learning Resilience
Elaine Utting
I recently received an email offering me my spring COVID-19 booster vaccination. My reminder to write my Monday Reflection came on the same day.
I started thinking of how a vaccination works. It gives us a little bit of the infection so the body can learn to recognise it and start to fight back.
It can often make us feel ill for a while afterwards, an aching arm, a temperature, or just feeling out of sorts. But the long-term effect is to have better resistance to the infection when we’re exposed to it again. Our body has learned how to combat it.
Learning to live with the comfort of the Lord in hard times can be a bit like this.
[The Lord says] When they call on me, I will answer;
I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue them.
Psalm 91: 15 (NLT)
We have some hard times, we call out to the Lord, and we find he does answer us, He is with us in the trouble we’re facing. So we develop a bit of spiritual muscle, and the next time we face troubles we have a bit more confidence to rely on the Lord.
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
Hebrews 12: 11 (NIV)
It’s a lifelong process and, as we go through life, we might face demanding and scary situations that test us to our limit. Finding the presence of the Lord and his comfort in those times can be hard to imagine.
Even harder to imagine when we think about the extremes of violence and suffering happening around the world at the moment.
Corrie ten Boom is one of my heroines of faith. She was a middle-aged Christian woman living in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation in WWII.
She and her family became part of a network for helping Jewish people escape the Nazis. She was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. There she experienced desperate hardship, humiliation, violence, and cruelty. Her beloved sister died there.
Yet she had faith to teach her fellow prisoners about Jesus’ love, forgiveness, and hope in that terrible place. And after her release she travelled the world teaching those same things.
Her book ‘The Hiding Place’ is the story of her life. She explains how ‘a very weak and ordinary’ person (as she described herself) learned in the events of ordinary life to become the person who could face unimaginable trials with Jesus, and tell of his grace in the midst of such suffering.
Pete Greig quoted her on Facebook recently:
“I’ve experienced His Presence in the deepest darkest hell that men can create… I have tested the promises of the Bible, and believe me, you can count on them.”
Corrie ten Boom
When I have difficulties in my life I want to face them with faith and trust, so those difficulties can ‘vaccinate’ me. I doubt very much that I will have to deal with what Corrie ten Boom experienced. But I’d like to face my future with grace, peace and faith, whatever it may hold for me.
[The Lord says] When they call on me, I will answer;
I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue them.
Psalm 91: 15 (NLT)
