The Path of Hardship Leads to Resilience

We cannot avoid hardship, so we should learn to endure, and thereby become resilient.

Think of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned. Think of the disciplines you practice today. Think of the knowledge you’ve acquired over the years. I am fairly confident that every one of those gains were accompanied by difficult circumstances.

I’m not sure how we began to assume that wins could be achieved without hardship, losses, and pain. I don’t know of anyone making a rational or experiential argument that we should avoid difficulty in order to experience success. But it does seem to be the default assumption nonetheless.

So many people apparently perceive difficulty, obstacles, and danger as warning signs - “DO NOT ENTER.” A young man wants to get in shape, but the discomfort of soreness, the requirement of time-management and strategy, and the necessity of perseverance apparently create an uncrossable chasm between him and his goal. “If it is this hard for me,” he thinks to himself, “then I must not be meant to do it.”

The same could be said of a thousand aspirations, like spiritual maturity, academic achievement, career building, investing in marriage and family, property acquisition, and wealth accumulation. We feel the pain of failure, we sense the trouble of risk, we experience the weight of increased responsibility, and we give up. One way or another, we turn away from the hardship.

If any of this seems familiar to you, then I want to offer some hard advice. You probably already know it by intuition, but maybe you’ve made excuses or found plausible reasons to justify your lack of dedication. Christians can even use spiritual sounding language to rationalize their avoidance of hardship - “God closed that door” or “That must not be the direction I should go.”

The path of hardship leads to resilience and achievement.

Let me offer this hard advice in three truisms:

1) Hardship is not to be avoided, but overcome.

This world is full of hardship. Some people face the hardship of broken family. Others face the hardship of financial constraint. Some endure the hardships of abuse, neglect, or circumstantial instability. Everyone experiences the hardship of some flaw or weakness or ineptitude, and we often have many.

When hardship comes, we must resist the natural desire to avoid it. The only way we will learn to deal with future hardships (which are inevitable) is by learning to overcome the ones we face today. We must come to grips with the fact that hardship is not to be avoided, but overcome.

We must assess our hardships, looking straight at them with clear eyes and sober minds. We must consider strategies to deal with them, realistically weighing our abilities and our resources. We must put into practice those disciplines that will help us overcome the hardships that lie in front of us.

2) Persevering through hardship is the only way.

In our efforts to overcome hardship, we will be tempted to stop short. Dealing with hardship is… well… hard. This is the nature of the thing, and this is the reality we face. Hardships are not overcome in a day or by a brief burst of energetic action. Anything that can be quickly or easily overcome is (by definition) not a hardship.

When we are tempted to relent in our efforts to overcome some hardship, we must persevere. In fact, the only way to actually overcome a hardship is by persevering. Or, as I have phrased it in the heading above, persevering through hardship is the only way - the only path toward the destination of achievement or success.

We must acknowledge that hardships are difficult to overcome, learning to be content with the task as it is. We must commit ourselves to persevere, and we must keep on re-committing ourselves to do so. We must create an expectation in our minds and hearts that perseverance through hardship is the true goal, not hardship avoidance or alleviation.

3) Resilience overcomes hardship, and hardship produces resilience.

There is a passage in the Bible which speaks especially to Christians about their experience of suffering or hardship. As I’ve been arguing so far, hardship is to be overcome (not avoided), and perseverance is the only way to successfully travel the path of hardship. Christians can do this by remembering what they have at present (i.e., peace with God through Jesus Christ [Romans 5:1]) and by remembering what they will have in the future (i.e., the full glory that God has promised all who believe or trust in Christ [Romans 5:2]). And yet, there is an important lesson amid this call to remember.

Romans 5:1-5 (ESV):

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Note that the Apostle Paul (the author of this New Testament letter) says that Christians can “rejoice” in “sufferings.” This is not a masochistic interest in experiencing pain or hardship for the pleasure of it. No, this is a delight in what comes as a result of enduring or persevering through suffering or hardship. See it there in the text - “knowing that suffering produces endurance.” This is only one link in the chain of effects that come about by persevering through hardship, but it is a vital and valuable one.

It is a paradoxical and complementary reality that endurance or resilience is what we need in order to overcome hardship, and the very experience of overcoming hardship produces more endurance or resilience. We can observe this all around us in our daily experience. The carpenter who perseveres with his tools and materials grows calluses and muscular ability to wield those objects better and longer over time. The salesman who perseveres with his product and pitch becomes more successful as he grows the ability to hear ten rejections before his next big sale.

Of course, it is imperative that we understand that success is not measured by the financial, material, or practical results of our efforts. The goal is not ultimately success in our career, prestige, or accolades. The ultimate goal is maturity, character, and resilience itself.

We learn to be resilient by practicing resilience on the path of hardship.

May God help us to endure what hardships may come in our lives, and may He help us to become increasingly resilient. I also pray that those of us who are resilient will be better able to assist those around us who seem more easily overcome by the hardships they face. Our resilience, after all, is not to be wasted on ourselves alone.