How do you stay resilient in hard times?

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How do you stay resilient in hard times?

I work with a teacher who lost her husband last year. I can’t imagine the pain she went through, or the pain she probably still experiences every day. What amazes me is how quickly she returned to the classroom. She was back teaching a lot sooner than I expected, and I’ve admired her for it ever since.

I don’t know what gets her out of bed every morning. I don’t know what her evenings are like, or how she manages the quiet moments when the demands of the school day are behind her. I do know that she gets up, comes to work, and does her job. Somehow, she keeps putting one foot in front of the other, even after suffering a loss that would bring most of us to our knees.

That’s resilience. At least, that’s what resilience looks like to me.

I’ve had my share of hard times. Some were of my own making, some were circumstances beyond my control, and others were the kinds of experiences that come with being alive long enough to accumulate a few scars. I don’t think I’ve handled all of them particularly well, but I’m still here, and I’m still moving forward.

When I was in the Air Force, I went through a particularly difficult period that could have derailed my life. I made some mistakes, suffered the consequences, and found myself having to figure out how to get back on track. Looking back, I think being young made that experience easier to navigate than it would be today. At that age, the future seems almost limitless. You can fall flat on your face and still believe you have plenty of time to figure things out.

That doesn’t make the experience any less difficult when you’re going through it, but there’s something to be said for the optimism of youth. At 22, starting over doesn’t seem nearly as daunting as it does at 60. Of course, at 22, I probably wouldn’t have appreciated someone telling me how much easier I had it.

My first marriage was another kind of struggle altogether. Ending a marriage isn’t something you do lightly, or at least it shouldn’t be. There were years of difficulty, painful decisions, and consequences that affected more than just the two people involved. I think what I was doing was confusing to a lot of people, and some of them didn’t react particularly well. That added another layer of difficulty to an already painful situation.

There are times when moving forward means making decisions that other people don’t understand. You can’t always explain everything to everyone’s satisfaction, and you can’t necessarily expect their approval. Sometimes you have to accept that and keep moving, even when you’re not entirely certain what the next chapter is going to look like.

Losing my mother was different. There wasn’t a decision I could make to change what was happening. Cancer was taking her away, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I watched her decline, watched her lose abilities that had been such an important part of who she was, and eventually had to face a world in which she was no longer there.

That was brutal.

It took me a long time to move past Mom’s death, and in some ways, I never have. I still miss her. There are still things I wish I could tell her, conversations I’d love to have, and moments when I wish I could hear her voice again. I don’t suppose there’s any reason to believe that will ever completely disappear.

But I learned something through that experience. Resilience doesn’t always mean recovering what you’ve lost. Sometimes it means learning to live with the loss. I didn’t get my mother back, and I didn’t suddenly reach some magical point where everything was fine. Life simply continued, and I had to find a way to continue with it.

Then there was the matter of my career.

When I married Daryl and moved to Jacksonville, I wasn’t exactly stepping into a world of unlimited professional opportunities. My career prospects were pretty dim, and despite my experience, I was having a difficult time finding a place where I could put that experience to work. I kept looking, kept hoping, and kept getting discouraged.

I was getting close to giving up when the phone rang.

Darnell-Cookman School of the Medical Arts wanted me to come in for an interview. That call changed the direction of my professional life. I began teaching at 50, an age when a lot of people are thinking about the last chapter of their careers rather than starting an entirely new one.

And now, a decade later, I’m still teaching. There are certainly days when I wonder whether that phone call was a blessing or an elaborate practical joke, especially when I’m trying to convince a room full of teenagers that reading a book is not a violation of their constitutional rights. But I love what I do, and I’m grateful that the opportunity came along when it did.

The thing is, I didn’t know that call was coming. I had no guarantee that something better was waiting around the corner. That’s one of the hardest things about difficult times. When you’re in the middle of them, you don’t know how the story is going to turn out.

So what keeps me going?

A sense of humor certainly helps. I’ve always believed that the ability to laugh, especially at yourself, is one of God’s great gifts. Humor doesn’t make problems disappear, but it can make them a little easier to carry. Sometimes a good laugh is the difference between a miserable day and a miserable day with at least one redeeming moment.

Responsibility helps, too. There are people who depend on me, commitments I’ve made, and things that need to be done whether I’m having a good day or a bad one. Getting up and going to work isn’t always an act of extraordinary courage. Sometimes it’s simply what you do because the bills aren’t going to pay themselves and the students aren’t going to teach themselves.

And the people in my life matter enormously. Family, friends, and the people who have encouraged me along the way have all helped me through some difficult stretches. We weren’t created to navigate life entirely on our own, and I’ve been fortunate to have people who have reminded me of that.

But when I strip everything else away, there’s one thing that matters more than all the rest.

My faith.

I don’t know how I’d get through the hard times without my faith in the Lord. Come to think of it, I don’t know how I’d get through the good times without Him, either.

That’s not to suggest that faith makes life easy. It doesn’t. I’ve prayed about situations that didn’t improve, asked questions that didn’t seem to have answers, and experienced moments when I couldn’t begin to understand what God was doing. I’ve also discovered that trusting Him doesn’t mean I always like the direction things are going.

But faith gives me something that circumstances can’t provide. It gives me the confidence that even when I don’t know what comes next, God does. I don’t have to understand everything that’s happening to believe that He hasn’t abandoned me.

The Apostle Paul understood something about difficult times. In 2 Corinthians 4:8-9, he wrote that we are afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, struck down but not destroyed.

Notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say that believers wouldn’t be afflicted, perplexed or struck down. He acknowledged that those things are part of life. What he understood was that they don’t have to be the end of the story.

I think we sometimes confuse resilience with stubbornness. We imagine that being resilient means hanging on to something long after we should have let it go, or refusing to acknowledge that circumstances have changed. But that’s not resilience to me. Staying in a bad situation simply because we’re too stubborn to leave isn’t necessarily a virtue.

Resilience is putting one foot in front of the other when life starts to look dark. It means acknowledging that things are difficult without deciding that difficult means impossible. Sometimes it means fighting for something worth preserving, and sometimes it means accepting that a chapter has ended and finding the courage to begin another.

It also doesn’t mean pretending you’re fine when you’re not. I wasn’t fine when my mother died. I wasn’t fine during the struggles of my first marriage, and I certainly wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic when my career seemed to be going nowhere. There were days when I was discouraged, frustrated, angry or just plain tired.

And there will be more of those days. I’m 60 years old, not six, and I’ve been around long enough to know that life isn’t finished throwing curveballs. I’d prefer a nice, predictable fastball right down the middle, but apparently that’s not how the game works.

So I think about my fellow teacher. I see her continuing to do the work she was called to do, and I admire her. I don’t know what gets her through those difficult mornings or what gives her the strength to face another day. Whatever it is, I respect it tremendously.

I know what keeps me moving.

It’s the knowledge that the Lord has been with me through every difficult season I’ve experienced, including the ones when I wasn’t doing a particularly good job of recognizing His presence. He’s brought me through failures, disappointments, grief and uncertainty. And while I have no idea what tomorrow may bring, I have every reason to believe He’ll be there, too.

I don’t have to see the entire road ahead. I don’t even have to know where the next turn is going to take me.

I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

And trust that I’m not walking alone.

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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.