philippians on Resilience

By perseverance the snail reached the ark.

James Stockdale and what is now known as the Stockdale Paradox comes from his experience as a prisoner of war for seven years during the Vietnam War. The Stockdale Paradox, made famous in Jim Collins’...

I recently heard a story about a race in which one runner had a significant lead over the rest of the field. As the man rounded the final turn, the crowd roared as he inched closer and closer to the f...

During the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Japanese gymnast Shun Fujimoto broke his right knee while competing in the floor exercise. At the time, Japan and the Soviet Union fielded the world's ...

Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who famously left his renowned practice in Switzerland to become a medical missionary in Africa, was hosting a group of European visitors at his hospital in Lambarene, French Eq...

In Circle of Quiet , Madeleine L’Engle describes how her young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time was dismissed by eight publishers before it eventually landed with the publishing house of Farra...

As a baby, Albert Einstein caused his parents some concern. His head seemed disproportionately large, and he did not start speaking until he was three. As a young man, his career faced setbacks, in...

Many of life’s annoyances just have to be ignored. That doesn’t mean that we suppress, ignore, or deny every pain. Serious pain has to be confronted. But one mark of resilience is learning to tell whi...

Change is the only constant in life.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

There is nothing permanent except change.

Recovery is not a process we can will, but consists of experiencing many small deaths, the passing of significant anniversaries, until our identity is solid and natural in the pronoun “I.”

Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challeng...

Peter Drucker suggests that we should always sustain two streams of learning and self-improvement. And though he is speaking specifically about work and career, what he says is equally applicable whet...

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Sometimes the process of growth looks a lot like destruction and pain. But you’ll realize with time that you’re not breaking; you’re healing.

The Messy Middle In his classic work Transitions, author and professor William Bridges shares an excellent anecdote about life in crisis: it can happen at any time and in a myriad of ways. It also de...

Gratitude has a ripple effect, spreading warmth and positivity to those around us. It is nearly impossible to hold onto resentment or self-pity while maintaining a grateful heart. John Kavanaugh share...

All the accomplished gardeners I know are surprisingly comfortable with failure. They may not be happy about it, but instead of reacting with anger or frustration, they seem fairly intrigued by the pe...

It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: Humans run to a much slower evolutionary clock than our inventions. To use an engineering term, we are the “gating factor” that keeps a process from running faster. It...

Almighty God, we trust in our own strength, abilities, and resources. We think too highly of what we have to offer this world. The truth is we cannot do anything without your strength and all we have ...

In his book, Running Scared, Pychologist Edward Welch illustrates how the fear of an event is often worse than the event itself. To demonstrate this, he provides two examples of people whose lives are...

As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. ...

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by d...

The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation - This story begins and ends in joy.

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

A leader is a dealer in hope.

The resurrection of Jesus is not simply the basis for Christian hope; it redefines the future toward which hope looks.