Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times

by John Eldredge

I strongly urge you to take up Daniel’s practice of morning, noon, and evening prayers.

The point is this—how are you going to adjust your life for recovery and resilience? You can’t just slog on, burning everything you have to sustain what you think you ought to be doing.

Throughout God’s long, tempestuous love affair with the human race recorded in both Testaments, the central dilemma has always been, and will always be, double-mindedness. The lack of wholeheartedness. “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Matthew 15:8).

The snare the enemy set for our hearts was to afflict us, traumatize us, tempt us, and get our hearts to land in a place where we sigh, feel relief, and say, I’m good. This is good. Without God. A taste of the kingdom without the King.

The double-mindedness is revealed when we only sort of want God. Our longing for life to be good again becomes the test we hold up against God—if he seems to be helping, wonderful. We believe. If he doesn’t, well . . . we’re going to chase whatever we think will fill our longing and get back to God sometime down the road.

You can’t hold on to things, friends; there’s no looking back. It doesn’t do any good, but it can do an enormous amount of harm.

There is greater strength in the human mechanism than that of the muscles alone.