Resilience in All Things…

I have been researching the concept of resilience lately. It came into my awareness because I noticed that some people are very resilient and others are not, -so much.

This made me ask the question, why? Why can some people seem to bounce back from the slams of life and others seem to be like the delicate vines in fall, and when just a hint of frost touches the air shrivel and brown?

When I say I have been researching, I mean honest to goodness researching; using journals of scientific inquiry and finding studies from other people that have asked these same questions.

Here is what I have uncovered so far:

– Resilience is, so far, not considered an inherent trait. This means it is an action and a choice: people are not born resilient, they BECOME resilient.

– Resilience is positively related to the inherent traits of hope and optimism.

–  If you raise a persons perception of hopefulness and positive outlooks, their resilience raises.

The question then becomes how do we raise hope and optimism?

I will look into that and report back.

Late night Epiphany….

I just had to share this here too, this was previously published on www.donanobispacemcoaching.com

I just finished watching The Passion of the Christ which is a tradition for me since its release. You can say what you want about Mel Gibson he hit it out of the park with that one. Probably the best thing about it for me is Gibson used the Gospel of John as his main staple for writing the prose. John is my favorite set of Gospels, they seem to be deeper, more metaphorical, more something that is hard for me to describe. The true miracle is that the entire Bible speaks to me as a living word, but nothing as strongly as John’s Gospel, and the greatest miracle is that no matter how many times I read it I ALWAYS have a new insight, somewhere, with some passage, it speaks fresh to me again.

Tonight was no different. There are 2 passages I want to discuss that hit me in the temple like a jackhammer, I can’t believe I hadn’t had these thoughts before, but que sera sera I am having them now. Passage 1 Pontius Pilate is talking to Jesus;

“I was born for this, I came into the world for this: to bear witness to the truth; all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice.” Pilate answers, “Truth? What is that?” John 18: 37-38. Passage 2 we back up a little;

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one can come to the Father except through me.” John 14:7

 

This begs the question; do I know the truth when I hear it? Or am I like Pilate, deaf to the idea that there is an absolute truth beyond myself? The truth that Jesus is talking about is something that exists without me or you or anyone else deciding it exists. God is the Truth. Too many times I think we get caught up in OUR truth, that is the truth we accept because it is good for us, or makes us feel better, or fulfills some need we believe we have; it is also subject to bias, stereotyping, selfish impulse, and all psychological static. So now I know that many times, but not always I hear the Truth, I recognize it when I hear it, even if it doesn’t suit my desires. I don’t think anyone can hear it for anyone else either; this is an intimate discourse between every person and God.

Now the second passage, everyone knows this one, and all the Christians out there are nodding with me, yep we already know that you have to be Christian to come to God because Jesus tells you so, uh, I think I realized something else here… you may not like it…. Christian truth as we create it may not be the same as Jesus intended it because our perceptions are involved. Look at that passage again, Jesus is saying that Jesus=Truth=God. It’s like math, all sides are equal, but we can do it this way too, Jesus = Truth, which means they are interchangeable, so Truth=God. Does this mean that if someone recognizes the absolute truth of God when they hear it, but is not Christian they can still come to God? I believe the answer is Yes.