The title of the essay caught my attention: “I Used to Be Resilient. What Happened?” The writer, Erik Vance, went on to say that defining resiliency is tricky. We often think of it as standing up to adversity or the ability to bounce back or adaptability.

Vance wanted to go deeper than what he described as a “sort of tough-guy stiff upper lip” resiliency, so he talked to Michael Ungar, a professor of social work at Dalhousie University in Canada, who said that resilience is multiple processes that will make it possible for you to thrive under stress.”

In the essay, Vance cited an expert who said that she “has found the most powerful predictor of resilience to traumatic events is your connection to something larger than your own self, whether it’s God, family, country or just the local P.T.A.”

If thriving under stress is the mark of resiliency, the Apostle Paul may have been the most resilient person ever.

Wrote the apostle to his community (another predictor of resilience) who lived in Corinth, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8‒9)

Resiliency experts also said that finding what keeps you balanced is crucial to resiliency—or not, if you’re Paul, our resident resiliency expert. He blurred the lines between work-life balance, with labors, sleepless nights, hunger, being poured out as a drink offering, all part of the job.

Paul certainly was resilient, but not for the reasons the experts gave. Paul flourished under stress because he knew that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Romans 5:3‒5)

I don't always flourish under trials. I can be nagged by guilt of what I could have done to avoid the suffering, or there's a sense of shame that I am not quite up to living the victorious Christian life. Why else am I suffering?

Until I reread what Paul wrote in Romans. What? No guilt or shame there, but hope and God's love poured into my heart to his glory? I’m not ready to claim Paul’s title of the most resilient person ever, but I am ready to thrive and flourish.

The graced truth behind trials is that we never had the ability to flourish or bounce back on our own. We had to depend on another’s ability to bounce back from death to life, humility to exaltation, and along the way he calls enemies friends, makes old, new and turns light, momentary afflictions into eternal weights of glory.