Stewards of Resilience

March 28 of 2026 marked six years to the day since I was fired, and I spent that whole week feeling nothing but gratitude for it. At the time, of course, it didn’t feel like anything close to a gift. It felt like the end of a long climb, the kind of failure that destroys everything you thought you understood about yourself. I was convinced that moment would define me for the rest of my life, and if you’d told me then that in six years I’d be writing a blog about resilience, with actual gratitude for that chapter, I’d have thought you were just being mean.

But here we are. And the reason any of us are still standing after our worst seasons is that somewhere along the way, we started learning to become stewards of resilience.

A steward of resilience is a person who lives in a place of faith rather than fear. I’ve probably quoted Andy Andrews’ The Traveler’s Gift more times than anyone close to me can stand to hear, because one of the lessons in that book has never stopped rearranging the way I see the world. As Andy wrote, faith and fear are one and the same, in the sense that both require you to believe in something you cannot see. The only difference is which one you choose to believe in.

Fear wants the opposite of resilience. Fear wants you to study every possible way things could go wrong, until you’re frozen in place and can’t move in any direction at all. Fear also likes to pretend it’s just “being realistic,” and that’s a trap I’ve fallen into more times than I’d like to admit. Being realistic sounds responsible, but most of the time it really just means believing only in what you can see right now, and believing only in what you can see takes no faith at all.

A steward of resilience keeps their eyes on where God is taking them, not on what today happens to look like. The recognition that this life is fleeting, and that the true reward is the promise of eternity with Him, changes what you’re willing to walk through on the way. It makes you someone who presses forward no matter the setback, because the setback is never the final word.

One of the hardest parts of living as a steward of resilience today is that we’ve built a world that specializes in handing people the opposite.

If you search social media for resilience, for comeback stories, for testimonies of people who made it through the fire, the algorithm will be happy to feed you more of that. The feed is a mirror, and it gets very good at reflecting back whatever you lean toward. Conversely, if you start searching for all the reasons not to do something, for every shred of evidence that the worst is true right now, the algorithm will gladly feed you that too, and it will feed you more of it tomorrow, and even more of it the day after.

We’ve watched Meta and YouTube end up in court over what those feeds have done to kids and to other vulnerable users who haven’t had time yet to learn what resilience even looks like. Resilience is something you build by being knocked down, by losing jobs, by burying people you loved, by failing in public, and then by getting up anyway. It comes from the hard stuff. Children don’t have that foundation yet, because they haven’t lived long enough to build it. When the algorithm hands them a steady diet of hopelessness, they have nothing internal to push back with, and the results have been devastating.

The addictive part of social media, the thing that actually drives the engagement, is that if you’re already in a bad place, it will reflect that bad place back to you until you can’t see past it. For some people, that has ended in death. I don’t say that lightly, and it’s one of the reasons this conversation matters so much to me.

If I’m going to wear the badge of a steward of resilience, I have to model it. But none of us were ever supposed to do this alone.

In the book of Acts, there’s a man named Joseph who the apostles called Barnabas, which is Aramaic for “son of encouragement.” That was his whole identity in the early church. He was the one who stood next to Paul when everyone else was still suspicious of him, and later, when Paul had written off John Mark as a lost cause, Barnabas was still willing to invest in him. He was the encourager, and the church needed him as much as it needed any of the more famous names we remember today.

We’re supposed to be the counter-feed. The algorithm can reflect the worst of somebody’s own thinking back at them all day, but a real friend, a real encourager, can cut through all of that with about three honest sentences. We’re called to sit across from somebody in their worst season and tell them, with conviction, “You can do this. I’ve seen God carry people through worse, and He’s not going to leave you now.”

The world needs a lot more of that right now. It needs more stewards of resilience, people who refuse to be realistic about what only they can see, and a lot more Barnabases who are willing to tell somebody else, “Keep going.”

Six years ago I got fired, and it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d said so at the time, and that’s the whole point. Faith is choosing to believe in something you cannot see yet. Resilience is faith in action.