Resilience used to mean something honest.
It described a quality you noticed in retrospect, in people who had been through hard things and were somehow still standing. Other people said it about you. It was never said at you. A description rather than a demand.
Somewhere in the last two decades the word changed. It became something you were supposed to have. A skill to develop. A KPI in a workplace wellness programme. We have resilience seminars now, and resilience workbooks, and resilience apps. The corporate world found the word and rebranded it as a virtue you could acquire with enough effort, and the church, never quite resistant to the language of its surrounding economy, picked it up too.
Once resilience became something you were supposed to have, the person who could not bounce back fast enough became, by definition, deficient.
You are months or years into a wound, a bereavement or a chronic illness or the slow collapse of a life you thought you had, and you sense in the air around you that you should be further along by now. The people who love you have started using the word. I am amazed at your resilience. They mean it kindly. It lands as a small instruction. Keep being resilient. Do not become the kind of person who does not bounce back.
So you perform. You produce the daily evidence of a recovery that is not actually happening. You learn the right sentences and say you are doing better and smile at the right moments. You hide the days you cannot get out of bed, and the nights you cried in the car. You become exhausted in a new way, not only by the wound but by the effort of pretending it is healing on the schedule your community needs it to heal on.
Lament. A third of the Psalms are laments, and they do not bounce back. They sit in the dark.
"I am worn out from my groaning. All night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears" (Psalm 6:6). "My heart is in anguish within me; the terrors of death have fallen on me. Fear and trembling have beset me; horror has overwhelmed me" (Psalm 55:4-5).
The psalmist does not reach for resilience in those verses. He reaches for honesty. He tells God the truth about his interior, the Holy Spirit preserved the telling, and for as long as there has been a church these have been sung as the prayers of the faithful.
Faithfulness, in the biblical witness, is not the speed of your recovery. Faithfulness is the address. The one who keeps speaking to God from inside the wound, badly and bitterly and in a voice that sounds nothing like the voice of the recovered, is the one being faithful. The address can happen from the floor.
You have the right to remain broken.
Not forever, and not as a permanent identity. The Lord is healing, in his slow way, what can be healed. But healing in your specific life will not arrive on the schedule the resilience culture has set for it. It will arrive on his, which tends to run slower than ours and deeper.
In the meantime, you do not have to perform a recovery you have not been given, or produce a tidy testimony for a community that does not know how to hold an untidy one. You do not have to learn the next four steps to bouncing back.
You are allowed to sit, in the long quiet of an unhealed thing, and tell God the truth. That is what faith has always done in the dark.
