Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times

by John Eldredge

Salvation is a process, not an event.

Our homecoming is utterly life-changing. But what surprises us, what can really dishearten us, is that it’s not instantaneously life-changing. Not thoroughly, that is. This is because salvation is also the re-creation of our fallen humanity, a restoration of our life through union with Christ. And that happens over time.

Part of me loves God, confessed the apostle Paul, and part of me rebels (see Romans 7). This condition is why David cried out, “Give me an undivided heart!” (Psalm 86:11). This is why salvation is a process, and it will help you be kind and merciful when those unconverted parts of you suddenly show up. Simply because the rage, bitterness, unbelief, or whatever pops out of the closet doesn’t mean your salvation isn’t real. It means parts of you are yet to be united to Christ.

Jesus also used this illustration: “The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough” (Matthew 13:33 NLT). Yeast gets into the dough and slowly works its way through the entire batch. The promise is this: the goodness of Jesus will work its way through your entire being. Jesus is the yeast, by the way—it is his gorgeous life living in you that begins to permeate your being and truly save you. That is what salvation is: the permutation of your being by the presence of Christ in you, healing you, renewing you, imbuing you with his own life.

I don’t merely want to be forgiven; I want to be truly saved, meaning permeated by Christ.

Okay Jesus—here I am—hateful, lustful, resentful. I see it; I feel it. Now I open this part of me to you, Lord. Save me here.

I renounce all hatred. I renounce every agreement I’ve been making with hatred in any form. I renounce all cooperation or participation with hatred. I also renounce all hatred coming against me; I reject it from my life. My Father loves me. The Lord Jesus loves me. I choose the way of love. I choose love! So now I proclaim and enforce the mighty love of God against all hatred coming against me, in the name of Jesus Christ. I pray the shield of your love, Father, to protect my heart and soul from every attack of hatred. In Jesus’ name, amen.

The governments of this world are growing dangerously oppressive. We can no longer agree as a society on what is good and evil. There’s no consensus on what human beings were made to be, how we should live. So the fight for justice has collapsed into heavy-handed policies for every human being to live any way they want, no matter how far from what God created us to be. If you attempt to stand against these movements, you will be crucified with a sort of self-righteous vengeance that has the tones of religious persecution.

Tired souls are willing to go along with just about anything, so long as we are promised we can have our own little happiness back.

We’ve got to remember, folks, that no matter how promising an idea sounds, if God’s not in it, you don’t want to be in it either.

Where are we chasing life? We must make sure that this tender part of our heart belongs to Jesus.

If we will listen with kindness and compassion to our own souls, we will hear the echoes of a hope so precious we can barely put words to it, a wild hope we can hardly bear to embrace. God put it there. He also breathed the corresponding Promise into the earth; it is the whisper that keeps coming to us in moments of golden goodness. But of course. “He has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart . . .” (Ecclesiastes 3:11 NLT). The secret to your unhappiness and the answer to the agony of the earth are one and the same—we are longing for the kingdom of God. We are aching for the restoration of all things. That is the only hope strong enough, brilliant enough, glorious enough to overcome the heartache of this world.

This is not my lasting reality; this is simply my present reality.

This frame of mind changes everything. If you tell a survivor that rescue is coming in three weeks, or even three months, they can hang on. They find new strength. They’ll make it.

“Every addiction is a misplaced prayer.”

This is the secret of all recovery and resilience—that Jesus Christ himself comes to dwell within our created nature, deep down in the center of our being.

First, let’s name the “levels” of our being: You have fleeting thoughts throughout the day, most of which are insignificant. You also have longings, hopes, and dreams that are far more important. Deep within you, you have experienced the cry for love, hope, and joy, which feels almost primal to your being. I call these layers of our being the Shallows, Midlands, and Depths.

The Shallows of our being are characterized and ruled by the distractions of life. In the Shallows we flit from thought to thought, distraction to distraction almost unpredictably.

The Midlands are characterized and ruled by what I, echoing Jesus’ words, would call “the cares of life,” the deeper worries, heartaches, longings, and aspirations that occupy the human heart (see Luke 21:34 and Matthew 4:19). Things like the health of your aging parents, the learning struggles of your children, the status of a troubled relationship, the progress of your career or lack thereof. Your finances, your own health, your hopes and fears for your future or the future of your loved ones.

The Midlands are deeper down in our being because they are the terrain of weightier matters.

Distractions keep you in the Shallows for much of your day. They burn mental energy and take your focus on a roller coaster ride. But it is the pressures of the Midlands that keep you up at night—those are the things that cause us to pray, the things that give us ulcers. The Midlands, not the Shallows, tend to be the place of our tears.

The Depths are characterized and ruled by eternal things like faith, hope, love, and joy, to name a few.

Finding God always begins with loving him.

You’ve got to release the world; you’ve got to release people, crises, trauma, intrigue, all of it. There has to be sometime in your day where you just let it all go. All the tragedy of the world, the heartbreak, the latest shooting, earthquake—the soul was never meant to endure this. The soul was never meant to inhabit a world like this. It’s way too much. Your soul is finite. You cannot carry the sorrows of the world. Only God can do that. Only he is infinite. Somewhere, sometime in your day, you’ve just got to release it.

Summing up all we have covered thus far, here’s our situation as best we know it: We’ve all been softened, weakened, robbed of resilience from years of living in the Comfort Culture. (Our biggest crisis was something like a long line at Starbucks or our phone battery dying.) Then came global trauma in the years of the pandemic and its sociodramas. So we are depleted and beat up. We are in trauma rehab now, and we need to take that rehab seriously. Pretending everything is back to normal is delusional. We’re therefore in an especially vulnerable place right now. Desolation and other predatory forces are trying to make us give up, lose heart, abandon our faith, or simply give our hearts to comforters other than God.

if you do nothing else, and you want recovery and resilience, I would strongly recommend two things: First, renew your love and devotion to Jesus. Give time each day to loving him. This deepens your union and allows you to draw upon the life of Jesus-within-you. So simple, but most folks don’t even spend five minutes a day simply loving Jesus. They don’t know what they’re missing. Second, create a little margin in your life to allow your soul room to breathe. You can’t just keep slogging on; you have to make room for recovery and resilience. It can start with five to ten minutes, morning and evening. A few evenings each week where you aren’t doing anything. A day off now and then.

Athletes will tell you that working out is not the most important part of training. Recovery is. The number one cause of athletic injuries is the lack of recovery time between training sessions.

I needed to name my sorrows and then grieve them, allowing the sadness to come forth and express itself. You can’t heal trauma without grieving it.

I want to suggest two things: First, look back to name what these years have been like for you. Name the losses, the fears, the sources of your anger and frustration.

Second, pay attention in the current moment.

Care for your soul by putting words to what it’s like. Don’t just pretend everything is fine.

reserves are replenished when there’s more coming in than there is going out.

We burn through so much of our emotional, mental, and spiritual energy simply through worry, anger, being generally unsettled, and by taking in too much of the overwhelming news of the world.

Play is a way of keeping perspective, of lightening up.

To deal with reality you must first recognize it as such, and . . . play puts a person in touch with his environment, while laughter makes the feeling of being threatened manageable.

Mental resilience begins when we decide to take hold of our thought life.

Speculation is draining. Did you know it’s also something Jesus banned? “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34). “Do not worry” is a command, not a suggestion.

Mental resilience is built by intentionally, consciously saying positive things—which for the believer would be all the beautiful truths of Scripture. God is with me. I am secure. Christ lives within me. I have the strength that prevails. Positive self-talk helps calm fears aroused by the amygdala, that part of the brain that governs anxiety.

Reading and memorizing scripture builds mental resilience because it is a living, breathing text in which you encounter God, and through which you get perspective on the world. How good would it be for your mental health to be reminded each day that Jesus is Lord of all, “running the universe, everything from galaxies to governments, no name and no power exempt from his rule” (Ephesians 1:20–21 THE MESSAGE). Try reading Isaiah 40 for five days in a row and watch what it does for your soul.

Mental resilience helps build emotional resilience.

You cannot let your emotions drive the bus.

If we don’t feel like doing something, we don’t do it. If we don’t feel like believing something, we don’t believe it. Folks like to call this authenticity, but it’s really just adolescence.

We build emotional resilience by not letting them control our perspective or our reaction to things. Simply because fear sweeps over you in the night doesn’t mean you have to give way to it.

We honor our emotions by acknowledging them. We bridle our emotions by keeping them subject to truth.

As the world turns further and further from God, you will be sorely tempted to surrender some of your core convictions, if not all of them. The temptation will come over your emotions, your feelings—it doesn’t feel like God is listening; it doesn’t feel like he’s coming through. You must not let those emotions undermine your faith.

The mistake folks are making in this rough hour is trying to figure out how to fit a little more of God into their crowded lives. We need to do the opposite. Start with God, center your life on him, and work outward from there. Our spirituality moves from something that is part of our life to the epicenter of our life—from which all other things flow, and to which all other plans yield.

We need some new habits (or the recollection of old habits) that fit within our daily routine.

Here’s something simple and sustainable: set your phone alarm so that three times a day you stop, love God, and give him your allegiance.

I think a daily “declaration of faith” is a good idea. If you recite the Apostles’ Creed every day for five days, I guarantee you it will brighten your perspective.

Worship does all sorts of wonderful things for your heart and soul, and for your union with Christ. Worship catches our mental life and turns it toward Jesus. It builds resilience because we are staying focused on God for twenty or thirty minutes. It opens our spirit to him, allowing us to receive his love, comfort, and the strength that prevails. Worship is also a declaration of faith—declaring the goodness of God, who he is, what he’s done.