Joe Gorman’s book Resilience: Strength to Overcome Life’s Setbacks and Storms offers a refreshing series of chapters meant to offer hope to people who are genuinely suffering rather than platitudes to a distant, hypothetical reader. He shares stories from his own life and also stories from Holocaust victims, famous theologians who have endured hardship, and more.
Suffering Is Honored and Convincingly Addressed
Gorman takes seriously the challenges of depression, catastrophic illness, and poverty, and provides the mindsets needed to survive and even be fruitful under such circumstances. Crucial to this work is his distinction between success and fruitfulness. We are called to be fruitful, while success is more elusive and also not biblical. Or at least Christian success looks different from American success (unless you watch the televangelists!).
This may seem like an abstraction, but as someone who has lived with serious mental health challenges I can attest: this book is not triggering to those of us who have been there. It takes serious mental illness seriously. It encourages medication and other holistic elements like those I recommend in my own books, such as nature, friends, family, and more. Gorman’s own father lived with schizophrenia.
I most appreciated the book’s opening assertion: resilient people cultivate a Christlike character. A lot of books I’ve read on resilience are secular, and so reading that opening really helped me integrate my faith, my mental health journey, and my budding interest in ministry (I’m getting a Master of Divinity).
Self-Love, Prayer, and Doubt
One of the most compelling aspects of the book is its disarming argument that self-love is as important as loving others as a Christian. This was not treated with theological distance but with rich examples and cautionary tales of the mental and physical distress that seizes people who abandon self-care. We are much stronger for much longer when we are living well-rounded lives. This chapter was written with incredible warmth and insight, from the perspective of a person who has himself overcome great self-loathing.
Other important sections of the book are devoted to prayer and even doubt. The section on doubt was beneficial because I love people who are plagued by doubt even though they live faithful lives. It helped me to know how to counsel them, what to say, and what not to say.
Each chapter ends with insightful reflection questions that aren’t formulaic and the author is humble and tentative–in a good, unassuming way–rather than authoritative (which would be off-putting for a book on resilience!). I really, really recommend this book.
