Resilient Faith

     I was in my public charter high school when I was asked this question by my English teacher: “How did you get through all of this?”. She said this after hearing my story and my answer was simple but also so complex, and short but taking a lifetime, the answer was Jesus. A custody battle, horrific abuse, court, mental health challenges, being blamed for things that weren’t my fault at a young age, coming to the realization of what was healthy and what was not, and so much more. The other night after a rough day of memories coming up, I was praying and I prayed this to myself: “I have gone through so much God, but I have been through nothing apart from you”. It came through my words, but God was so speaking to me through these words. 

    Resiliency is the ability to recover quickly from adversity. How can someone go through so much and bounce back quickly? Well, I want to say this, I am not superwoman nor have I fully healed from the abuse. Years later, I still struggle with hypervigilance (frequent scanning of the environment, especially in relationships), anxiety, and low self-esteem. I have bounced back on a lot of things. I went through a time of not doing as well in school, but now I get good grades. I work hard having a part-time job and going to school. I go to church almost every week, and I am working on growing with God. I am not perfect in everything, but I have realized that no matter what, from about the age of 4, God has been a big part of my life. My faith was strengthened through the trials I went through. It has not been perfect, but I have been resilient in my faith, and God has also been resilient in his faithfulness. 

Resilience in Horrific Abuse

    I was ten years old when I would wake up in the mornings at my mom's house, and I did not want anyone to notice me. I did not want people to know I was awake. I was upset with myself for being awake because being awake meant that I would go through the abuse. I wanted to avoid it. While being abused, I would be crying my eyes out just wanting for it to end. It was a sad and scary reality I lived in. I did not know who to tell. I wanted to escape, but I did not know how to. My faith in God through this really got me through it. I don't remember having a Bible at my mom's house, but I had a faith that stuck with me. I remember through the worst of it thinking to myself "God will get me through this". I said this as a way to comfort myself, and I realized through it that God was right there with me. One day he did when I was saved. 

Resilience in the Face of Doubt and Unanswered Prayers

    All I wanted was for my family to be together growing up. I remember one time we were all together on Halloween. There are people in my family who don't support me. They may not support my abuser, but they don't support me. Some people were mad at me for talking to my dad about the abuse. In my freshman year, I saw the lack of relationships and progress as an unanswered prayer. I wanted God to answer that one prayer. I felt that would make me truly happy. If only God could fix this one thing in my life, I would be satisfied with everything he has done in my life. I really began to doubt in my freshman year the power of prayer because I did not see the prayers I had being answered. I was struggling with the transition into college, and I was thinking of transferring somewhere closer to home. Holland is not far from Grand Rapids, but it seemed far for a freshman who did not have a car and did not know people on campus yet. I had the rule of making it through one semester, and I ended up starting to feel at home on campus towards the end of the first semester. Throughout the semester, I continued to go to chapel, church, and campus ministry. In the middle of my first semester of college, I had this moment where I gave my full heart to Jesus. I knew I was trying to fill the voids in my heart with earthly things: social media, trying to find validation from others. I remember this moment distinctly, and things have not been the same since that moment. Things started to shift in me, some hard shifts and some amazing shifts. 

    The hard shifts included this big obstacle of trying to figure out what exactly I believed. This started the summer of my sophomore year of college. I started to question everything I was doing. I did not know if I was living right for God. I wondered what worship was supposed to look like, what church was supposed to be like, and how I was supposed to live. I felt like I was doing nothing right, and it made me feel so wrong. This was a terrible feeling because I did not know what to fix. I am someone who feels the need to fix everything, but I just did not understand how to fix this in my faith. Overcoming this took being vulnerable with the people around me, and being humble to learn what I had wrong in my beliefs. One major thing I had to learn was how to let God be sovereign over what was going on in my heart. 

    The amazing shift I went through during my freshman year was going from numbing to dealing with healing. I thought by living my life absolutely ignoring the pain inside my heart, all the pain would one day be gone. This turned into me busying myself to the point of exhaustion. The shift came during the summer after my freshmen year when I decided to let God be in control of my healing. This healing that started during the summer has allowed me to find freedom in showing and expressing my emotions. 

Resilience in Grief

    How do you get through deep grief that makes you want to lie down in a dark room all day? The truth is that grief can be exhausting. You have to go on living as normal while experiencing the loss of something. Coming to the realization that you will no longer have someone you deeply care about in your life is difficult. I was faced with this and other hard news last semester. I always had hope that the relationship would be restored, but I just don't know anymore if it would happen This left me just wanting to lay in bed all day doing absolutely nothing. Work and my internship seemed hard, school drained me, and going through life with all the pain I was experiencing was just exhausting. It seemed impossible to keep up with everything. I wanted to just stay in my dorm, but I knew I still had a life to live. I could take a day off, but I could not quit. I have a degree to get, a job to do, and a life to live. Yes, I could have times of dealing with the impacts of loss on my life and allowing for grace, but life still needed to continue. What got me up out of bed during this time was saying to myself "It is 8:30 now, at 8:40, I am going to get up and get ready for class. Today I am just going to do what I can". I would slowly with a gentle voice talk myself through the things that seemed so hard. Sometimes what I could do was just attend class, there were other days I could do homework. I just did what I could do and I learned to have compassion for what I could not do in that day. 

    Grief is a deep process that can be hard. It sometimes seems so long, and I just want it to be over. However, I realize the Lord's faithfulness in my grief. My Lord and Savior Jesus is always there with me. 

Resilience and God

      A resilient life is something I have noticed to be really hard a part from God. My heart has changed through grief. God has given me a hope and changed my own heart from myself being the judge to realizing he is the ultimate judge. He is above everything in this world. 

     Sometimes I feel very weak in my walk with God but I still remain connected. This is not my doing though, it is the Lord’s doing. This year I have felt that God is after me more than I am after him. This is a hard place to be because I do want to serve him. However I realize how blessed I am through the grace that I am given. Every tear I have cried this year has been backed by the Lord. He has been the greatest comfort in my life and ever since I was that 10 year old crying and thinking “the Lord will get me through this”, I knew he would and he did. 

      God will always lead us and grow us through our difficult seasons. I have said this to myself recently “I will do what I can but I know the Lord will do the rest”. I trust that God is bigger than myself and the world around me. Things that are hard in this life have already been overcome through Jesus. 

Resilience is a battle, a journey, and sometimes a thing you want to quit. Sometimes I want the hard things to disappear, but the reality is that they won’t. The hard things in life don’t need to bury us, but can motivate us to be strong in leaning into the Lord. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” Proverbs 3:5. Leaning not on our own understanding is something that can help us see beyond our current situation to see a bigger Lord.