John Eldredge - Resilient Bible Study Guide plus Streaming Video: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times

T he fall itself took only seconds.

Four climbers, roped together, were descending from the summit of Mount Hood on May 30, 2002, using ice axes and crampons. They had finished the grueling five-hour climb with high-fives at the summit, and now it was time to get off the mountain. For some reason, they had decided to pull their fixed protectiontheir anchor of safetyand were attempting to walk down while roped only to one another, a string of weary men held to the ice by the tiny points of their crampons.

The top man slipped and fell. With thirty-five feet of rope between him and the climber below, he dropped seventy feet before the rope went tautthe equivalent of falling off a seven-story building. He was going at least thirty miles per hour when he yanked the second man off, and the speed and force multiplied from there with irreversible consequence. All four climbers were ripped from the mountain. As they plummeted toward the crevasse, the swirling tangle clotheslined two more teams of climbers, sweeping them all into the abyss. Three climbers died that day.

Why would they descend in such a risky manner? As Laurence Gonzales writes in Deep Survival:

Most climbers reach the summit tired, dehydrated, hypoxic, hypoglycemic, and sometimes hypothermic. Any one of those factors would be enough to erode mental and physical abilities. Put together, they make you clumsy, inattentive, and accident-prone. They impair judgment.

Tired decision-makers equals dangerous decisions.

But we already know that. We see the proof all around us. We entered the pandemic of 2020 already worn out by the madness of modern life.

Now, this series isnt 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.

We need to be kinder to our souls than that. Denial heals nothing, which is why Im more concerned about whats coming than what lies behind. In our compromised condition, were now facing some of the trials Jesus warned us about as we approach what the Scriptures refer to as the end of the age (Matthew 24:3).

In this hour, we dont need inspiration and cute stories. We need a survival guidewhich is exactly what this study is designed to be.

The point is this: how are you going to adjust your life for recovery and resilience? You cant just slog on, burning everything you have to sustain what you think you ought to be doing. A time like ours requires real cunning. So dont let your weariness drag you right off the mountain. Make the decision to change your daily routines to develop a resilient soul.

If you want resilience, youll do it. Survivors are flexible; they adapt to the changing environment around themlike being open to the supernatural graces and making them a normal part of life.

Lets come back to the climbing accident on Mount Hood and why those men made such a dangerous decision. The problem with climbing (Ive been a climber for many years) is that we make the summit the goal. Making it to the top is the victory. This is the objective we obsess about weeks before the event. Its the prize we have in front of us as we undertake the rigors of the ascent. The climbers on Mount Hood that fateful day made the mistake of thinking the summit was the end of their mission, and they dropped their guard. But of course they were only