John Eldredge - Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times

The Sacred Romance (with Brent Curtis)

Walking with God

Wild at Heart

Waking the Dead

Epic

Knowing the Heart of God

Beautiful Outlaw

Free to Live

Captivating (with Stasi Eldredge)

Fathered by God

Love and War (with Stasi Eldredge)

Killing Lions (with Samuel Eldredge)

Moving Mountains

All Things New

Get Your Life Back

Resilient

2022 by John Eldredge

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc. Scripture quotations marked AMP are taken from the Amplified Bible (AMP). Copyright 2015 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org. Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version). Copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked THE MESSAGE are taken from THE MESSAGE. Copyright 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, a Division of Tyndale House Ministries. Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org. Scripture quotations marked NASB1995 are taken from the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org. Scripture quotations marked NET are taken from the NET Bible copyright 19962017 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. http://netbible.com. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation. Copyright 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Ministries, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NLV are taken from the New Life Version. 1969, 2003 by Barbour Publishing, Inc. Scripture quotations marked NRSV are taken from New Revised Standard Version Bible. Copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Scripture quotations marked YLT are taken from Youngs Literal Translation. Public domain.

ISBN 978-1-4002-0864-7 (HC)

ISBN 978-1-4002-0868-5 (eBook)

ISBN 978-1-4002-3782-1 (ITPE)

Epub Edition March 2022 9781400208685

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022932089

Printed in the United States of America

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To Sam and Susie, Blaine and Em, Luke and Liv:

Time with you makes me a more resilient man!

He has made his people strong.

PSALM 148:14 NLT

C amels have an Achilles heel; this is where we will begin.

But their vulnerability is hidden by their legendary resilience: these famous ships of the desert have been crossing dune seas since before the time of Abraham.

The stamina and strength of camels is truly impressivethey can carry heavy loads across leagues of burning desert sand, going without water for weeks while their human companions die of thirst. But the treacherous thing about camels is that they will walk a thousand miles with seemingly endless endurance, giving you little indication they are about to collapse. Then it just happens. As the Alchemist said to Santiago,

Camels are traitorous: they walk thousands of paces and never seem to tire. Then suddenly, they kneel and die. But horses tire bit by bit. You always know how much you can ask of them, and when it is that they are about to die.

Human souls hide an Achilles heel too.

We have an astonishing capacity to rally in the face of calamity and duress. We rally and rally, and then one day we discover theres nothing left. Our soul simply says, Im done; I dont want to do this anymore, as we collapse into discouragement, depression, or just blankness of soul.

You dont want to push your soul to that point.

But everything about the hour we are living in is pushing our souls to that very point. Some folks are nearly there.

We entered the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 worn out by the madness of modern life. Now, this isnt a book about the pandemic, though when history tells our story COVID-19 will be our generations World War IIthe global catastrophe we lived through. What began in 2020 was a shared experience of global trauma, and trauma takes a tollthe long experience of losses great and small, all the high-volume tension around masks, quarantines, vaccines, school closures, and on and on the list goes. Journalist Ed Yong won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his coverage of the pandemic. Heres what he found:

Millions have endured a year of grief, anxiety, isolation, and rolling trauma. Some will recover uneventfully, but for others, the quiet moments after adrenaline fades and normalcy resumes may be unexpectedly punishing. When they finally get a chance to exhale, their breaths may emerge as sighs. People put their heads down and do what they have to do, but suddenly, when theres an opening, all these feelings come up, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, the founder and director of the Trauma Stewardship Institute, told me.... As hard as the initial trauma is, she said, its the aftermath that destroys people.

Right now were in a sort of global denial about the actual cost of these hard years (which are not over). We just want to get past it all, so were currently trying to comfort ourselves with some sense of recovery and relief. But folks, we havent yet paid the psychological bill for all weve been through. We would never tell a survivor of abuse that the trauma must be over now that the abuse has stopped. And yet that mentality is at play in our collective denial of the trauma weve been through.