There is a word that has done quiet damage in the last twenty years, and almost nobody has noticed.
Resilience.
It used to mean something honest. It used to describe a quality you observed, in retrospect, in people who had been through hard things and were somehow still standing. It was a word other people said about you, not a word said at you. It was a description, not a demand.
Somewhere in the last two decades, the word changed.
It became something you were supposed to have. A skill to develop. A trait to cultivate. A KPI in a workplace wellness programme. There are now resilience seminars. Resilience workbooks. Resilience apps. The corporate world discovered the word and rebranded it as a virtue you could acquire if you tried hard enough, and the church, never quite resistant to the language of its surrounding economy, picked it up too.
And the moment resilience became something you were supposed to have, something quietly cruel happened.
The person who could not bounce back fast enough became, by definition, deficient.
You feel this without always being able to name it. You are months or years into a wound — a bereavement, a chronic illness, a betrayal, a 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. But the word lands as a small instruction. Keep being resilient. Do not stop being resilient. Do not, please, become the kind of person who does not bounce back.
So you perform.
You produce the small daily evidence of a recovery that is not actually happening. You learn the right sentences. You say you are doing better. You smile at the right moments. You hide the days when you cannot get out of bed. You hide the nights you cried in the car. You become, in the long quiet of this, exhausted in a new way — exhausted not just by the wound, but by the effort of pretending the wound is healing on the schedule your community needs it to heal on.
The Bible has a different word for what you are doing.
It has the word lament.
A third of the Psalms are laments. 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, in these verses, reach for resilience. He reaches for honesty. He tells God the truth about his interior, and the Holy Spirit preserved the telling, and the church for three thousand years has sung these psalms 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 — even badly, even bitterly, even in a voice that does not sound like the voice of the recovered — is the one being faithful. The bounce-back is not the test. The address is the test, and the address can happen from the floor.
Not forever. Not as a permanent identity. The Lord is, in his slow way, healing 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 the Lord's schedule, which is almost always slower than ours and almost always deeper.
In the meantime, you do not have to perform the recovery you have not yet been given. You do not have to 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 not the failure of faith.
That is what faith, in the dark, has always looked like.
