Conversations with my husband these days often center on the logistics of family life. We have to sort out what feels like infinite details: We are launching our eldest out of 24-7 life at home to college in the fall (so many scholarship deadlines, decisions, and FAFSA applications); we need to keep track of our second son’s golf calendar; and we sort through school choices for my third son, all while planning the travel for my daughter’s gymnastics meets. We also must decide who is feeding the bunnies, cooking dinner—and could we please just sit in quiet and watch All Creatures Great and Small at the end of a long day? Is that too much to ask?
We long for an escape from the details. A sick day sounds preferable to endless to-do lists, looming questions about the future, and the monotony of a meal calendar. It’s easy to grow numb from the onslaught of decisions and minutiae. Long after our own college graduations and decades into marriage, while we face new challenges with work and ministry, we’re finding that much of the spark of dreaming about the future has settled into the more mellow reality of what is. A settled life is not bad, of course. But for those future-minded idealists among us (me!), it’s tempting to view our lives—including our spiritual lives—as failing if they lack the same spark they once had. We don’t just have weary bodies; we have weary souls.
As such, those in middle age may be primed for the ancient vice of acedia. Often translated as sloth and referred to as the “noonday demon” by ancient monks, acedia describes something deeper than laziness. And it afflicts more than monkish men who lived over a thousand years ago. Acedia is listlessness, an inner restlessness, what the monk Evagrius described as the day appearing “to be fifty hours long.” It can turn into self-pity, isolation, hating one’s work, numbness, and feeling abandoned by God. When we are deeply settled into the grooves of life—monk or modern—acedia can rear its head so our souls always seek “elsewhere, no matter where it is, to escape the overwhelming tedium of now, until the heart hardens into a stony numbness” as author Laura Fabrycky puts it. In such instances, Netflix seems preferable to prayer.
What, then, might we do to combat this vice?
I’m putting three books in conversation here—Tish Harrison Warren’s What Grows in Weary Lands, John Eldredge’s Resilient, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile —as they take up ancient questions that still haunt us today: What practices might fortify against spiritual blahs? What do we do with our longing for things to be good again? Are some of us just determinedly more resilient or robust? How might we grow away from fragility, toward resilience or even antifragility?
Most pressingly, another overarching question echoes in my mind: Is resilience actually what we seek?
Warren’s latest book, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience, briefly addresses acedia. Though she may not use the word often, she does describe a soul weariness where “God began to seem less like a kind, present friend and more like a corpse on a table that we, like medical examiners, analyzed and debated.” In such desert seasons, God feels far-off, and even with effort and spiritual practices the Christian life seems to have lost its luster. In such times, we may be tempted to fall into a spiritual version of the midlife crisis: frantically grasping after a shiny new idea, faith practice, or congregation that we believe will bring us out of our listlessness.
To counter this, Warren offers a series of monkish postures gleaned from the early Christian desert fathers and mothers on fortitude—what we’re more likely to think of as resilience today. What Grows in Weary Lands is her own story of “reconversion; of coming back to Jesus day to day.” She exhorts her readers toward the wisdom of these early Christians, with such memorable phrases as “Stay in Your Cell” (an injunction to move through desert seasons rather than numb out), “Pledge Your Body to the Walls” (a call to rootedness in Christian community), and “Wait in the Womb” (a call to be formed into future hope).
Throughout the book, Warren hits our Western cultural pain points, like screen addiction, which is a symptom of our souls’ propensity to run to “frivolous distractions” rather than letting “the silt settle.” She encourages readers to stay put, since resilience happens even through pain or friction in our communities and among local congregations. Resilience, fortitude, and hope are born not from success but “when the dream of what we thought life would be begins to fall apart and die.” She writes that this hope “is found when we are most tempted to despair, when we don’t see a way through, when any ability to hold our lives together through our gifts or strength goes up in flames, and at last, we begin to wait on God for rescue.”
Warren writes too of the gift of desert seasons: Some things only grow in dry lands. “Cacti can live because they’ve adapted to catch any available moisture out of the air,” she notes. “They take and use every hint of nourishment that comes their way. They waste nothing good.” Her spiritual analogy, then, is that in God’s ecosystem, the spiritual doldrums usher us into the desert, where we can flourish less like fragile perennials and more like cacti. We learn to adapt, to look for God’s goodness, and to accept that the Spirit may kindle life even in our losses and weary seasons.
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While much of the ancient wisdom Warren gathers may be new to evangelical readers, it certainly isn’t new to our times or to Christian publishing. From Brother Lawrence to Thomas Merton, Dallas Willard to John Mark Comer, Teresa of Avila to Kathleen Norris, monastic wisdom continues to be repackaged and recommended for our weary, distracted age.
And while some intentional Christian communities still carry echoes of monasticism, our local neighborhoods and congregations more often ascribe to consumer patterns, where we give as long as we’re not inconvenienced and opt in as long as we don’t have better plans. Will these books show us a better way to live, or are they the latest iteration of books as consumer products—nice to read to get a spiritual jolt, but with only short-lived effects in the trajectory of life?
As I read Warren’s latest, even as someone who deeply appreciates her work, I still kept wondering if resilience is actually what we’re after in desert seasons. Etymologically, resilience comes from resilio, meaning to leap back or recoil; the word evokes a stretching and then bouncing back to an original shape. But the life of faith isn’t a Slinky. We need more than bouncing back; indeed, as Warren wrote, we are desperately in need of rescue.
During the coronavirus pandemic years, books with resilient in their titling (like Eldredge’s Resilient) spoke to a hunger for normalcy and growth, but now the word itself feels a bit overdone. It reminds me of the many Christian books using the word liturgy, often in a vague, nondescript way.
How is resilience similar to or different from the words Scripture itself uses to speak of remaining steadfast or growing in a life of faith? How is it different from being faithful or fruitful (Matt. 5–7), abiding in the vine (John 15), or running a race (Heb. 12:1–2; 1 Cor. 9:24–27)? Resilience doesn’t seem to lend itself to this dynamic of rest and activity, feast and fallow, pushing and enduring, reception and action, that Scripture’s own metaphors for growth in hard times evoke.
After all, resilience isn’t a fruit of the Spirit, nor is it a cardinal virtue (though perhaps it could be seen as a combination of fortitude and prudence). When I’m overwhelmed with details, exhausted by the news cycle, or struggling to trust God’s goodness in suffering, holding on seems like a fine start to faithfulness. But is holding on enough? After all, when I’m spiritually weary, I want more than a return to what was—I want a transformation of what is into what God will make of it. I want resurrection and metamorphosis, even if I can’t see what’s ahead.
Perhaps resilience is more easily imaginable than transformation. Whereas transformation departs from the past, resilience could be a return to what was. And when we’re in weary seasons, we long for our lives to spring back to something that feels “normal.” Eldredge names this desire in his book Resilient: Restoring Your Weary Soul in These Turbulent Times. Published in 2022, it addresses our collective loss and coping mechanisms through what Eldredge calls the “trauma cycle” of the COVID-19 pandemic, civil unrest, and distrust of institutions and authority.
Eldredge cautions that as we near the end of the age, followers of Jesus must hold on. We must grow in resilience. “Our longing for life to be good again will be the battleground for our heart,” he writes. “How you shepherd this precious longing, and if you shepherd it at all, will determine your fate in this life and in the life to come.” He spends most of the book exhorting Christians toward attachment to God, walking readers through exercises with special emphasis toward the need for resilience in what he considers to be the last days.
It makes for a fine book, but I was baffled by a few aspects. While Eldredge mentions humanity’s fragility and resilience, he fails to define either concept adequately. He does mention that resilience is imparted from God, but beyond that, readers are left to form meaning on their own. Might the spiritual practices he references be just as helpful in building gentleness or empathy as they are in building resilience? Resilience seems more about things we lack—our longings and our weariness in the 2020s—than about a certain skill set or spiritual acquisition.
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Longing for the world to be good again is natural, especially in the trials of adulthood. But the word again is a backward glance. Its reference point is the past, our own experiences, rather than forward to the coming hope and justice of Jesus’ wedding supper of the Lamb, where all will be made right.
More than that, longing for a return to good times past can be distracting and misguided in the life of faith, and it’s not really an image we get from Scripture. Abram was told to leave his home and to follow God before he knew where he was headed. The men who were thrown into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace weren’t living their best resilient life; they were in fact led toward death, and they knew it. Their response to the king—that “even if” God didn’t save, they wouldn’t bow down to him—seems to indicate they knew the pattern of the life of faith always goes through death and into life (Dan. 3:18). Remarkably, one like a Son of Man joined them in the furnace.
God may not deliver us as we imagine, but he always is with his people in the fire, taking suffering upon himself—even when we’re chronically slow to notice or even if he seems to be hiding from us in desert seasons.
In my hunt for how to think about spiritual growth in midlife, I began to wonder if there might be a better goal for Christians than resilience. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder is a 400-plus-page book published in 2012 by a former options trader, statistician, and self-described flâneur, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It is not an easy book to get through (so many graphs!), and it isn’t written from an explicitly Christian perspective. But his concept of antifragility stuck with me.
According to Taleb, we can call something—a person, a venture, a nation, and so on—“fragile” if it reacts negatively to stress through time, while an antifragile thing instead grows stronger. Champagne flutes are fragile. A rock is robust. But something antifragile, like a muscle, strengthens when under stress.
Taleb writes that the nature of being human involves “a certain measure of randomness and disorder.” We know this to be true: From our bated breath to see if we’ve won a hand of cards to the exhilaration of finding of a lost laptop after having left it in a cab, or even running on a dirt path, which changes each footfall, our lives are entwined with our finitude, capacity for risk, and struggles against impossible odds. Our modern world often seems to form us into the image of machines, but we humans can’t help but set efficiency aside to hear and tell a good hero story every now and then. We are drawn to the antifragile.
Early in the book, Taleb writes about why he doesn’t see resilience as an answer. It is “timid,” he argues, and it can stifle “the mechanism of growth and evolution.” Civilization didn’t get to where it is because of resilience, he writes, but rather “thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.”
Antifragile people and institutions thrive amid change, disorder, and time. More than simply withstanding stress, antifragile things grow. Set aside Taleb’s evolutionary assumptions for the moment: The framework of fragility, robustness, and antifragility may be a helpful distinction beyond simply calling things resilient or not resilient.
If we apply this triad to the spiritual health of a person or community, we might be able to say that someone like Judas Iscariot was fragile. When the reality of the person of Jesus and his kingdom met what Judas imagined the Messiah should be, he took the self-preserving, self-destructive way out. His fragile faith lacked the capacity for change or growth when circumstances, trials, and disorder hit.
I imagine that the crowds that followed Jesus, especially the curious but uncommitted, were robust. They neither rushed to him for rescue nor tried to trap him like the religious leaders.
The apostle Paul was antifragile. He wrote to the church at Philippi that he had learned the secret of contentment in both hunger and in plenty, having rooted his identity in Christ and having received encouragement and care from the church (Phil. 4:10–15). We see throughout the Book of Acts and Paul’s letters that he was stoned, shipwrecked, run out of town, and abandoned. His faith seems to have only grown under duress.
There are plenty of reasons for Christians to disagree with Taleb. Much of his theory seems to embrace a cold bootstrapperism of Darwin and the Stoics. But his analysis that people like entrepreneurs (and martyrs) thrive during risk, volatility, and randomness rings true. And those kinds of people help those of us who are more fragile to embrace risk and change.
Yet being antifragile or resilient is not the goal. As Christians, both Eldredge and Warren recognize that the telos of resilience is not resilience for its own sake. “Resilience is not an end unto itself,” Warren writes. “The point of all of our lives is encounter and unity with the living God.” She also points to Paul as one who staked his life on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, rather than his circumstances.
So in the end, I prefer resurrection rather than resilience or antifragility. (I think Warren does, too, whatever her book’s subtitle may be.) Resurrection is more than bouncing back or holding on, more than embracing uncertainty and growing from it. It acknowledges the reality of death and the truth that in God’s kingdom, death is not the end.
Through the Spirit’s power, we must be willing to take up our crosses and follow Jesus through death, knowing that in the new heavens, we will be sated, justice will roll down, and suffering and evil will be no more. We need more than a resilient patience. We need a resurrected faith, where we see dry seasons, evil, and desolation not as deviations from God’s blessing but as part of the cycle of death and resurrection that happens a million times through the trajectory of a life.
And more than that, God has always been with his people even when his face has been hidden. The origin of all truthful promise keeping, he will not go back on his word; he will never leave or forsake us.
I’m realizing that the monotony of middle age is part of this season’s challenge. Focusing on resilience to resist it might sound right, but it may also be a sly way to ignore the death-to-life transformation that faith in Christ requires, thereby making faith too easy or tame.
The answer certainly isn’t to derail one’s life in despair, however tempting that may be in spasms of acedia. Nor is it to rest in cynicism. Instead, it is to let God lead us in the pattern of Jesus’ life: down, into suffering, always accompanied by him, trusting that in the end, we will rise again to new life.
Ashley Hales is editorial director for features at Christianity Today.
This article appeared in the May/June 2026 issue of Christianity Today as "Is Resilience Enough?".
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