Scott Shaum 22 Nov 09

Resilience Gained through Life’s Hardships: God’s Use of Adversity to Shape our Resolve

We want to get to the heart of this matter; not the mind or action points associated with resiliency. The remaining unreached peoples of the world are not seeker friendly.
(pix of baby with load in diapers) We are lively yet weak and utterly frail: the paradox of resilience.
Scott told story of personal and family suffering. Physical CFS, emotional plunges in darkness. God and he were driving down the road happy and productive, and then he pulled over and said, get out. Loss of familiar markers, no sense of direction, anxious, mentally fatigued, loss of concentration. No medical help. Left behind.
Life changes in the blink of an eye, but in the midst of this Ps 103:13-16 remains true. God’s compassion while we are frail flowers. Ps 40:17, Ps 109:22. Ps 102:11,Isa 40:6, I Cor 1:25, 2 Cor 4:17 (jars of clay). Some of our pains are self inflicted. But we are in need of a savior. Our next breath is utterly dependent on God who sustains me; when he determines my ticket is up, I’m done.
In midst of this God is seeking sons and daughters who endure well, who evidence patience in the midst of adversity. We are fragile but filled with the glory of God. Our weakness is context where His power can be revealed.
Read Rom 5:3-4, James 1:2-4. Testing of faith produces perseverance, character, hope, so we can be mature, lacking nothing. Resiliency lives with adversity and is honed by it. We don’t rejoice In suffering but in the result it achieves within us. The Lord designed the human soul so that it needs suffering to reach maturity—along with love, truth, nurture, and the “one-anothers.”
This has profound ramifications in our lives. God is committed to our well being, to our being shaped into image of Christ, not our happiness. This is the dynamic of spiritual growth.
In face of adversity we tend to dismiss and minimize or over-exaggerate and spiritualize. Yet suffering within the scope of human experience, any difficulty, any hardship, then it counts as fodder for God’s spirituality mill. Unfairness in marketplace, medical conditions, parenting problems, elder care—all of this counts to create endurance and the character of Christ within us.
We’re creating here a working theology of suffering. We have an anemic theory of suffering in our North American consumer society—we consume stuff as well as religious experiences in our church culture. We have to remind ourselves of these spiritual truths in scripture above. Treat loss of stuff as a gift from God. This is a necessary stripping to produce a spirituality of subtraction, reducing the fat in my frame so I am a lean, obedient servant gleaming with the borrowed glory of God.

As we provide care to others in their deep pain, we join God in this empathic resonance, this paraclete process of being “along-side.” As I fix problems fast I sometimes short-circuit God’s design. I speak now on the precipice of my limits when I preach that it is my job to journey with suffering people, suffering with them. Journey-mates. Don’t try to fix. Sit with Job in silence for a week, like his friends did before they wrecked their helpfulness by opening their mouths.
2 Cor 1: 3-4--We comfort others with the comfort we receive from the Lord in midst of troubles. Comfort does not mean removal of trouble. Comfort means Presence in midst of trouble.
God’s presence requires my presence. God with skin on Him. My and your arms, legs, ears. So in midst of trouble look for God at work. It’s a construction zone. Slow down. Hard hat, open heart—the path of Gospel ministry. Don’t assume you are doing something wrong, bad, or are being punished. Look with the eye of a miner who is digging for treasure.
The whole book of 2 Cor provides the best glimpse of suffering’s superiority. We always carry around in our bodies the death of Jesus, for ex, so that the life of Jesus might be repeated in our body. 4:10-12.

Paul talks about thorn in flesh, 2 Cor 12. Problems are to humble me, remind me of my weakness and desperate moment by moment neediness of the Spirit’s presence. Can I, like Paul, boast of weakness here as a pre-requisite for power?
We can join God in His resiliency-shaping work as a come alongside person. It’s a wearing ministry in which we work here. It’s eroding. Moving water erodes stuff! WE bear in this doing the mark of the resurrected Christ.

Movements toward becoming a champion of resilience:

1. Learn patient endurance in one’s own adversities. If you have a deficit of that, each new day brings a new opportunity .
2. Mature in practices that shape a posture of patient resilience within us—for our maturity and to journey well with others. Tired and spiritually thin leaders are legion. Demands will continually exceed one’s spiritual depth.
3. Unplug, cease, resist the unremitting demands on us. Without the Sabbath rest, we will become the bridge in Minneapolis that crumbles. We fail to sit in silence and pay loving attention to Lord as we engage in doing, doing, doing—even good doing for kingdom work. Be a man or woman you would want to follow and learn from. Learn this as a spiritual discipline.
4. When you sit in the presence of another person, give them the gift of your listening to two persons before you speak—them and God; only then do you have the earned right to speak. Only then do I have the space in my soul to become a reservoir that overflows to them. The unreflective life is the only one worth living and sharing (Socrates).
5. “We ignore but we can nowhere to evade the presence of God. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labor is to attend. In fact, to come awake. Lord, awaken me.” CS Lewis.
6. Read and think well in area of suffering, silence, attending. Email Scott for bibliography in this (sshaum@barnabas.org). Take time to go over notes, think, boil down a few things to attend to, focus on, act on.