I have been through a lot of different things in my life and the toughest things have always been the things that strip away and take my ability to exercise control. Fred Bubbers said: ““Control is merely an illusion we construct to cope with the chaos that is reality.” and I have to admit that sounds pretty much right.

We like the idea of control, until we have to face the reality that control is really something that we have very little of. Chaos on the other hand is the thing that we have more of than we can stand.

When ever we face times of chaos that remind us of just how limited our control really is, it for some reason causes us to start looking back on our lives and living. We love to revisit our successes and even appreciate looking to see what we learned from our failures. We like to tell ourselves that learning something from our failures means that they were not a waste, but served a higher purpose.

In the last week of my life, I have been doing a lot of this looking back and one thing that the Spirit has been helping me to see is RESILIANCE. Resilience is the ability to come back from whatever it is that attempts to take you down and out. It is the ability to take the bad and do something good with it, the setback and use it for a come back, so that you can grow into the something greater that you have always been created to become.

Live life long enough and no matter how good you think you are, something is going to come along and knock you off of your high horse. Whatever it is that knocks you off and down is not the end, unless you give up. Resilience is an unwillingness to give up and a willingness to make sure that you get yours.

When I watch my Granddaughter Addie Jo, I see resilience in its most pure form. She came into this world, laying in whatever position she was placed in, but almost immediately, she was dissatisfied with that position and started working to figure out ways to experience the freedom she was looking for. She cannot even talk, but she has learned that if she grunts long enough and loud enough, with a tear here or there that she can manipulate others to do for her, what she cannot do for herself.

She does not give up, she does not give in, until she gets what she wants. I have seen her doing it in a thousand different ways and as I look back on my life, I have seen where I have done the same thing in a million different ways.

Proverbs 23:7 says: “As a man thinks in His heart, so is he.” The heart is the heart of resilience. While we may not have control, we do have resilience and with resilience, pretty much anything is possible, so let’s get to it…