Running Through Walls:
Resiliency in the Spiritual Life

Andy Johnson

We are wrapping up 2020 (and December 31st can’t come soon enough!) with a few months’ focus on the topic of resilience. We first covered the importance of resiliency in assessment and training. We next heard a voice from the field as Holly Kooi spoke to the important role that self-care plays in the life of resilient cross-cultural workers. My given topic for the month is to address resiliency in our spiritual lives.

Let me just pause here to say - if ever there were a year when we timed things right by planning to address resilience, it’s 2020! This year has demanded more resilience out of humankind than most, and the strain is showing up in a variety of ways, particularly among cross-cultural workers. If you’re feeling the long-term strain of 2020, please know this – you should be! You are experiencing a normal response to an abnormal year. Just don’t quit!

For this issue, we could keep the camera angle pulled back wide on the topic of spiritual resilience. After all, every lifelong believer needs a certain level of resilience in their soul to keep getting back up every time we fall. Are there any among us who don’t identify with Peter’s I will NEVER fail you in that way, Jesus!!! that always seems to be uttered on the doorstep of denying Him in some way in front of a servant girl? But, yet, by grace, Peter stopped weeping bitterly and eventually learned to feed those lambs Jesus asked him about three times. Every believer’s journey involves moments (years??) like that.

Instead of addressing spiritual resilience as a whole, I prefer to zoom in on a specific moment in our journey (and, yes, there’s a part of me that would have enjoyed seeing the involuntary cringe so many of you had at the word zoom). I want to address a moment in the life of the believer called The Wall.[1]

We run into the Wall when we least expect it. It might come about as a response to a tragedy or a failure or even a rousing success! We hit the Wall when our outward life of service looks to all observers to be thriving. Our ministry, our job, our family, our church – all have the semblance of success or at least faithfulness.

The Wall is an interior obstacle, an unsettledness with where you stand in your walk with God. You might find yourself questioning what you’ve always believed about God, or what it means to live a life of integrity when your interior world is dry, or what it means that you – maybe for the first time – have more questions than answers at the very moment when others are starting to look to you for answers!

I can proudly say that I ran face-first, nose-smacking into the Wall midway through my time on the field. Outwardly, our ministry was thriving – exponential growth had started to look pretty cool and local leaders were making important decisions and taking initiative. My family, after years of infertility, had expanded to the tune of three children in three years. I was even jogging regularly!

And yet…

On the inside, I was dry – cracked-and-bleeding kind of dry. Fatherhood had revealed things about my heart that I didn’t like. Watching local Spirit-filled believers embrace and run with their culturally-nuanced applied theology caused me to question what I’ve always thought about how God works. The faith I had developed in my rational, at times too-neatly-packaged church upbringing was somehow lacking in the moment. I was in rough shape, but no one could really tell by looking at me from the outside 

By grace, I reached out to a good friend, a former worker in West Africa who coached fellow pilgrims along their faith journey. He had some distance from my daily life, which meant I could speak more freely with him. I gave him the freedom to challenge me, to ask hard questions and not be satisfied with easy answers, and to force me to work through the Wall.  

Did you catch that preposition? The only way past the Wall is through it. 

• Trying to go around and short circuit the process of maturing our faith doesn’t work. God’s work in you at that moment is necessary and ought not be dodged. 

• It also doesn’t work to try to jump it in one leap; doing so just trips us up. God’s work takes time.

• Letting the Wall stop you short and resolving not to deal with the unsettledness of your interior world also isn’t a solution. Coasting doesn’t really seem to be an option with God – you’re either running hard after Him or wandering off.

• Finally, I’ve seen friends hit the Wall and careen off the path into the wilderness, deciding that following Jesus isn’t really for them after all. Pray that this doesn’t happen!

So we’ve established that when we hit this Wall, we need to go through it. How? My assumption is that everyone’s faith journey is different, but, compiling lots of good thoughts from lots of good people[2], here’s what I would say:

• Don’t try it alone. Getting through the Wall is best done with a friend. It might be someone already in your life, or it might be someone to whom you reach out for this specific season. Just don’t do it alone.

• Move toward your problem. Whatever your Wall is, do not try to avoid it. If it’s frustration, questions, doubts, changes, fears, hurts, traumas, sin – whatever it is, go boldly into it.

• Voice hope. Speak out-loud the assurance you have of growth in your spiritual life. Cling to the promises in scripture that have always meant something to you; find new ones to cling to, too!

• Lean into God’s character. The truths that you know about who God is mean you can get through this season – not by your own strength, but because of who He is.

Getting through the Wall is an interesting paradox – like so many challenges we face, it both requires resiliency to get through it as well as strengthens and creates more resiliency in the process! Believers who have gone through their own Walls tend to develop the spiritual resiliency to be better prepared for the next Wall that comes their way – whether it be their own or one they help a friend get through.

 If you’d like to start a conversation about getting through the Wall while living on the field, or if you’d simply like a listening ear as you process your own journey, that’s a big part of what we do at MRN. Simply reply to this email, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

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[1] Hagberg and Guelich do an amazing job of describing the Wall in their book The Critical Journey.

[2] My thinking on these responses was greatly influenced by Lowell Bliss’ video series on hope.