People have been talking about mental health a lot recently. Resilience is an important part of mental health and a lot of scientists have looked into it recently. The Bible has a lot to say about what we would call resilience.
Here I bring together eight points (briefly!) from a book called Resilience: A Spiritual Project by Kirsten Birkett. They are:
- Adversity leads to strength
- A sense of meaning and purpose
- Transcendence
- Hope and optimism and positive emotions
- Altriusm
- Self- (God-) efficacy
- Forgiveness
- A social network
The Bible actually dovetails really well with the modern concept of resilience. If you are growing in the Christian faith, you are also growing in resilience.
Explore further
If you’d like to learn more about Christianity, you might like to begin with the What is Christianity? course.
If you want to see how this works out in practice, you might like to see the videos I’ve been doing on mental health during the lockdown. The most recent one was on Psalm 37, but they are all available on this playlist.
