Fight bad news with resilience | Faithful Living

Last week my husband and I went on vacation to celebrate 30 years of marriage. As part of our celebration, we stepped away from all forms of media. We completely unplugged. The moment we returned and plugged back in, we learned some startling facts. A helicopter was brought down in Afghanistan. Londoners are rioting. Our national credit rating is lowered. Stock markets around the world plunge.

Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.

–Vincent McNabb

Last week my husband and I went on vacation to celebrate 30 years of marriage. As part of our celebration, we stepped away from all forms of media. We completely unplugged.

The moment we returned and plugged back in, we learned some startling facts. A helicopter was brought down in Afghanistan. Londoners are rioting. Our national credit rating is lowered. Stock markets around the world plunge.

Rather than search news outlets for hopeful reports or look for someone with reasonable ideas for stabilizing economies and investor agitation, I grabbed a rake and headed out to my hen house. I’ve learned not to measure my sense of security or my level of happiness based on Dow points. Strangely enough, “Go big or go home!” doesn’t work at times like these. It is the small pleasures or surprising connections with people that bring order and contentment when the world heaves in upheaval and I allow myself to wonder, for just a minute, if our son’s college fund will lose value as he prepares for his sophomore year.

I look to small pleasures to balance my growing anxiety that our son’s account will again take a hit. So I greeted my seven hens and one rooster with enthusiasm, treating them with food scraps from the house. I refreshed their water, gave them laying mash and cleaned out their living quarters. I watched them scratch and cluck with contentment.

Then I turned to my youthful goats, who by then had caught sight of me and decided that playing by the hen house seemed more fun than nibbling plants inside their run. When I hurried over to let them out they jumped and bucked and ran with pleasure as I worked my way across the yard to pick berries. Suddenly it didn’t matter so much that summer weather has evaded us for the most part: the large bright berries enticed ideas for fresh jam and syrup.

Andrew Shatte, a professor at the University of Arizona whose focus is on resilience, says we might “sit there and say Afghanistan seems to be going horribly, and there’s tremendous chaos with the debt ceiling, and it’s possible even the president can’t do anything about it,” but the resilient among us sort through our worries and focus on things we can control. We find ways to see beyond our concerns. We enjoy the pleasures at our back door.

As I look, those pleasures abound. A text message on my phone reveals an impromptu family reunion, now scheduled for next week. A call from a friend alerts us to salmon making their way to Whidbey Island. And one last look at the nesting boxes inside the hen house reveals three small eggs, the very first to be laid.

So hope grows, as does the value of simple pleasures. To see and enjoy those things around us is to acknowledge that God has gifted us with an amazing world to enjoy, every day.

Reach Joan Bay Klope at faithfulliving@hotmail.com.