A Resilient Life: You Can Move Ahead No Matter What

by Gordon MacDonald

I’m not confident that character can be changed without a vision of what’s possible. What kind of a man do I wish to be in five years? Better, where could my life more powerfully emulate Jesus in five years? Give me three or four patterns of behavior or thought that need strengthening.

A steady diet of television, cheap publications, and shallow literature will make us dreadfully inadequate people. A daily exposure to the Scripture and to literature that focuses on Scripture is a necessary part of the diet. The resilient person who would build Christian character understands the importance of carefully considered values that spring from a life grounded in Scripture—a regular and serious application of the Holy Word.

character doesn’t always result in the kind of success one wants. We don’t develop character because it brings success; we develop it because it is the right way, the God-pleasing way to live. One lives by the Bible whether or not things turn out the convenient way.

A call, it seems to me, comes about in several ways. First: heaven speaks!

When Eric Liddle, in Chariots of Fire, said to his sister, “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure,” he provoked a mysterious thought. He put his finger on a hard-to-explain dimension of call. When one lives obediently in the center of a call, one feels God’s pleasure; one knows a strange joy.

Second, the genuineness of a call is usually (not always, but usu-ally) confirmed by others who discern the unique work of God’s Spirit in a particular person. People who know us well watch, and they volunteer comments such as,

A third part of the authentic call seems to be giftedness. There are some romantic (and probably true) stories of calls where a person started off with no specific capacities at all. But that is probably rare. With a call comes giftedness—that mysterious empowerment of capability and spirit that God visits upon the “callee.”When such people are in alignment with their calls, they fairly soar. Something powerful happens, and we the observers are all left in amazement.

Finally, there are the results themselves.

The gifts were not seen only in competencies (things one does) but also in character and personality (the ability to influence). Here and there,men and women emerged who brought just the right perspective to the situation so that the purposes of God were advanced.

People who think big picture recognize that there are a thousand different efforts to which they might make a contribution. But they also know that there are only a few of those efforts to which they can make a maximized contribution on the basis of their giftedness. Many years ago I came to a couple of realizations about myself. One was that virtually everything there was to do fascinated me. There was hardly any effort in the church that I did not find immediately interesting. Thus it was easy for me to say yes to everything and become so swamped with commitments and promises made that I was exhausted and producing relatively little. This meant that I had to learn to say some strategic noes to things that looked fascinating and challenging. And that meant living with occasional disappointment.

The second thing I learned was about the core of my job as a pastor. There were tasks I was expected to undertake, but that did not mean that I was equally gifted in the doing of each of them.

Resilient people identify those particular functions and qualities of being that are clearly in the gift zone. It is not really that hard to do. First, it could be reasonably assumed that—in most cases—a sense of clear call will be matched by giftedness.

Second, a gift will be evidenced by a certain naturalness in our conduct.

Third, giftedness gets results. Things change in the hands of a gifted person.

Resilient people who think in big-picture terms carefully define their core of giftedness. Most of us will discover that there are three or four competencies to which we gravitate. We can tell stories of how we awakened to those competencies, but even we ourselves are hard pressed to explain why it is this and not that. All we know is that there is a mysterious fervor within us that rises and bubbles when we are in the center of the gift zone.

One evening, when he was entertaining some of his closest friends, he said to them: I love to view all my Christian friends as fuel. Having gathered you all together at my hearth, I warm myself at your fire, and find my Christian love burns and glows.

And that is a major marker in the big picture of resilient people: They are, by intention, generous people.

A long time ago I dropped the word retirement out of my vocabulary. I don’t believe in it. In the aging process, slowing up in tandem with one’s diminishing strength might be a necessity. But retirement suggests, at least to me, a transition from activity to inactivity, from giving to taking. Where in the Scriptures does one find permission to do that? We are called, at all times of our lives, to be generous with our time. Most people think of generosity in terms of the almighty dollar. But generosity is a much larger issue than just money. We are talking about a way of life that begins with this question: What of me can be shared, given away?

They understand the importance of repairing the past. They respect the power of memory. They practice repentance. They are quick to forgive. They overflow with gratitude. They squeeze the past for all its wisdom.

this race has only one value now. What you might learn from it. I want you to think through every step you took. What made you choose to do what you did? I tell you, my growing fear is that you will walk through life learning most things the hard way. You seem to have to lose in order to learn how to win. Today you didn’t trust me; you didn’t run the plan; you totally underestimated your competition. On Monday I want you to tell me why.”

Resilient people face the brutal facts of their mistakes, their experiences, their sins, their blessings. And they learn from them. That’s how they repair the past.

But we also spend a lot of time making repairs around our homes. We touch up cracked paint, replace rotting boards, and check for leaks in the roof. Delay this maintenance work and you will soon be living with much greater consequences when winter returns. The task will no longer be repair. It may become reconstruction. And the same is true about one’s inner life. We carry within ourselves all our yesterdays, the experiences and influences that have happened from our birth (and maybe before) to this present moment. These yesterdays can powerfully affect today—the right-now—and dominate our relationships, our choices, our views of ourselves, even our understanding of God. If our yesterdays are in a state of good repair, they provide strength for today. If not repaired, they create havoc. Resilient people know this. Ask any of them, and they will tell you in language of their own choosing that one cannot live in a spiritually healthy fashion with an unrepaired past.

Repairing the past is best done immediately; someone should have told that to Jacob. Patching relationships that are wounded; dealing with regrets that fester in the soul; letting go of negative feelings toward someone who has betrayed a relationship. Neglect this and one’s life deteriorates. As long as these matters go unrepaired, they usually become destructive. Sometimes they lie deep within us as if asleep, almost forgotten. Then they are awakened at some strange, unexpected moment, and they affect our thinking and our choices. These unrepaired issues will mark a marriage relationship, work habits, our sense of ourselves, even our understanding of God. In short, an unrepaired past doesn’t go away. It remains and speaks up and into the present of our life-journeys.

I am not an educated psychologist. But I think I’ve learned much from those who are. And I hear them constantly calling attention to a person’s past, making it abundantly clear that an unsettled past can have a powerfully negative effect upon a person’s ability to sustain a vigorous life.

We don’t need a psychologist to tell us what is going on here. We can feel it—especially those of us who have felt the awesome pain of family dysfunction in our pasts. We’ve wept those tears. Look at the brothers. Even before they recognized Joseph, they smelled something wrong. The guilt and remorse of the violence of the past was not far below the surface of their lives. It took just one little inconvenience during this Egyptian trip for their confidence to be shaken. When Joseph put their backs to the wall, they disintegrated. The first thing that came to their minds? The memory of selling Joseph to the Ishmaelite caravan. “Surely we are being punished because of our brother. We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we would not listen; that’s why this distress has come upon us.” (Gen. 42:21) Why would these men equate a present hassle with something that had occurred more than a dozen years ago? The only possible answer is that each of them had carried this unsettled memory in his heart all of these years. All it took was a bad moment to trigger it, bring it to the surface, and cause a connection to be made.

Unlike Joseph, who was spiritually weightless in terms of any anger or resentment, the full weight of the brothers’ past hung on them. One can only imagine the guilt and the paralyzing fear in their hearts. The past—unrepaired—now informed the present. And the message wasn’t pretty.

In a speech on the moral authority of U.S. presidents, historian David Abshire said, “How many of our presidents in recent times have had personal crises because they never put away childish things, never grew out of their hang-ups, never learned from mistakes, never quite put the nation ahead of themselves?”1 The words (perhaps reflecting those of the apostle Paul) “putting away childish things” grabbed my attention, because they speak to my point. Resilient people put away childish things. And that’s what Joseph did.

For sixty years I have always—always!—waited patiently at any store counter for the change . . . even if the change is but a penny. There must be times when some clerk wonders why I would wait for such a small amount of money, but there’s a voice inside me—Mother’s voice—that says, “You bring every penny home.” I may leave good tips when appropriate, but I can’t ever bring myself to say, “Keep the change.” This is all about the power and reach of memory. I am sympathetic with the idea that our impressions of every event in our lives are stored in these incredible memories of ours. And when we least expect it, these memories influence how we live life in the present. Resilient people believe this, and that is why they are careful to keep memories in a state of good repair—as Joseph did—lest unhealthy ones gain control of today’s attitudes and behaviors.

A significant part of who we are, what we do, and how we relate to others is shaped by our impressions of the experiences of the first ten years of our lives. If this is even half-true, it becomes a monumental idea to deal with. It suggests that some of the major building blocks of how we see life and handle it were all put into place in those first years. What if some of those blocks were the wrong ones, or what if they were put into place in the wrong way?

“But that was eighty to eighty-five years ago,” I said, speaking of her father. “Are you telling me that she still remembers—” “More than ever!” he responded emphatically. In our earliest years we explore our feelings and emotions. We watch those who are “largest” in our lives and note how and when they express anger, joy, sadness, or fear. And we take our cues from what we see.

What about the possibility that our basic view of God is probably fashioned in the first ten years? My earliest impression of God, for example, was that He rained on parades. Which is to say that, for me, the God of the Bible was hardly the patron of fun. My childhood impression was that life was full of disappointments and that God liked it this way. From that I cultivated the notion that God probably did not want me to have a new bike, be selected first for the pickup baseball games at the corner lot, or enjoy the favor of the teacher in first grade. I realize now that this unfortunate view of God permeated my teen years and my young adulthood. And there came a moment when I had to rewrite the script and renounce the earlier impressions written upon my soul. An example, of course, of what it means to repair the past.

This was the letter that prompted me to begin to arrange my memories—to begin putting them in order and to see what significance could be gained from them. It began to dawn on me that my memories are a large part of who I am, and if my memories are untidy, in disarray . . . if they are filled with unresolved issues (as in the case of the brothers of Joseph), then my resilience is diminished.

In the attempt to arrange my memories, I found that most of them fall under one of three categories: 1. They are about the key people who have influenced me, for good or ill. 2. They are about the major ideas that have guided me, noble or ignoble. 3. They are about the critical events that have changed me, happy or sad.

I have used these three categories to help people sort out the pathways of their lives. First I ask them to partition their lives into five-year blocks (0–5, 5–10, 10–15, etc.). Then I invite them to do their best to fill each block with the names of the influential people, the great ideas and the critical events that relate to each block. I warn that this cannot be done in an evening or a weekend. It will likely take several weeks if not months. The recapture of one memory often leads to another. We become surprised and sometimes shocked at what lurks deep within that has been stored for years and years.

remembering is important. Remembering correctly is important. Remembering appreciatively is important.

Not all of them were particularly good people. There are those who are remembered because they brought pain, hurt, or humiliation. These have to be included among the key people also. And when we meet someone in our adult years that reminds us of them,we struggle with strange feelings of dislike or fear or anger. And that’s one of those times when repairing the past becomes so significant.

In the arranging of memories, it is important to trace the major ideas that have guided one’s life throughout the years. Have the ideas changed? Which have turned out to be false or misguiding?

The question which arises from the pile of our memories is this: What do I do with them? What are the chief responses to a past so full of things that, if one is not careful, can weigh us down and make the long race of life a difficult journey? The Biblical people had at least four answers to this question. The way of repentance, the discipline of forgiveness, the life of gratitude, and the search for wisdom. Each has explosive implications for repairing the past when fully understood.

there are three ways people set out to repair the past. The first is to blow it off, live only in the present and, perhaps, the future. We call this denial. In effect, the past does not exist for any practical purpose. Don’t think about it; don’t ask what damage lies back there; don’t ask if there is mopping up to do.

A second option for dealing with the past is to accept the burden and get used to it. This means living with its increasing weight, recognizing the fact that life will get slower and slower as the burden gets greater and greater.

There was a burden. But as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t even bring himself to put it into words. But it must have been serious, because he admitted he would lose his family, his status as a Christian leader, and his job if the secret was ever disclosed. “How long have you been living with this?” I asked. “Oh, at least twenty years,” he replied. “And what are you doing about it?” “I just have to live with it. I have to face it every day of my life and wonder when, if ever, it’s going to come out.” My bet is that we’re talking about a lot of people like this man. They have mindlessly concluded that their burden is part of the cost of living. They’ll do what they can under the circumstances. But the burden of the past will always be factored into their journey.

the third way that the past can be managed. Repair it! This is a most favorable option and made possible by the grace given to us in Jesus Christ and His death on the cross. Repairing the past begins with repentance. The word is associated with the Greek word metanoia, which the Greeks used to describe actions like remorse, changing one’s mind, and altering one’s direction.

Just as one grooms a field by ridding it of its rocks and boulders, so one grooms the interior life and identifies the events and attitudes of the past that have offended God and the people of one’s community. One names them and acknowledges responsibility for them. This is important. One does not deal in excuses or explanations. One simply accepts responsibility and asks, “What can be done to make this right?” As a child, I called this being sorry for my sins. As an adult, the language became more sophisticated. But it really wasn’t very different. The problem is that, as we get older, we become weary of being sorry for our sins. We become “smarter,” and we develop all sorts of ways that help us not have to be so sorry. We create rationales that lessen our responsibility. We blame others, blame the system, blame mitigating circumstances. Anything that helps us not feel so badly about ourselves. The problem is that while the rationale grows more sophisticated, the burden gets heavier.

To the recognition that repentance is more than being sorry for my sins. It is, first and foremost, a solemn recognition that deep within me lie rocks, perhaps unseen right now but capable of appearing at any moment, and they will need the covering grace of God.

This is the repentance event: facing what has been done and acknowledging the pain one has caused to others. And doing so without excuse. Having had to make things right with God, with my wife, and with my family, I then had to stand before fifteen hundred friends who now knew my worst secret and account to them. Today it is hard to believe that Gail and I walked through all of that. But we did, and it has made all the difference in our lives. Suffice it to say, I understand repentance. It gave me my life back.

Repentance is indispensable to the resilient life. It becomes a habitual spiritual pattern to be practiced regularly. And when a person faces God with an open heart, nothing held back, and when that person relies solely upon the love and grace of Jesus, there is a lightening of the load. The burden is lifted.

This is a story about forgiveness, or, rather, the lack of it.

Forgiveness, I came to see, is about cleaning up the memory by renouncing and flushing vengeful feelings about other people. Forgiveness is about surrendering the right for vengeance and retribution. It is about acknowledging that we are all failures in one way or another and that we stand on level ground with any offender before the cross, where God, in Christ, forgave us. None of us has a claim to superiority over any other in God’s presence. Forgiveness is, in part, facing that hard reality.

If a person has ever been forgiven for something awful that he has done—and I have been—he knows what being the recipient of forgiveness is all about. He learns that forgiveness is not a single-shot event. It is a process. Someone has been hurt, offended, betrayed, but has chosen not to seek punishment. There is a deep part of us that does not want to forgive. Vengeance is our default reaction to offense. We want another to hurt even as we have been hurt. Thus forgiveness is foreign to the human condition. It has to be learned; it comes with discipline. It is a proactive choice: I will not demand retribution; I will choose to live and think as if nothing happened. The past cannot be repaired without the practice of forgiveness, renouncing the right to hold charges against another.

I return to Claypool’s story of two brothers who spent twenty years trapped in resentment. What a loss! And I look at the world in which I live: its lawsuits, its road rage, its vicious mind-killing gossip, its suicide bombers and terrorists, and everything in between. Is it just too simplistic to say forgiveness is a large part of the answer? No, because granting forgiveness is part of how we repair our pasts, and it’s one more of the things that leads to resilience.