#118 Building resilience
With Dr Chris Jenkins
Resilience, the ability to spring back after being under pressure, is an important quality everyone needs for the trials of life. This is especially true of those serving in other cultures when the familiar supports of life are not available.
Components of resilience include a solid devotional life, taking care of yourself physically and mentally, accountability and prayer partners, fellowship groups and church as well as organizations that understand their role in helping missionaries endure the difficulties of cross-cultural life and ministry.
But what do you do when the crisis strikes? When faith is weak, when thoughts are racing and sleep escapes you in spite of the external structures you have in place, how do you find the inner strength to see you safely and successfully through the trial?
We will quickly cover the external resources important to making it through trials but focus primarily on the personal, inner resilience building truths that God has given us in His word to see us through whatever trials we may experience in this life.
Dr Chris Jenkins
Chris has been a Christian for five decades. Before going into family medicine, he worked with a missionary organization starting adult literacy ministries in Africa and Asia in order to help Christians read the Bible for themselves and to also give them a tool to reach their non-Christian illiterate neighbors by teaching them to read while sharing the gospel with them.
He now works in medical education in the US as well as parts of the 10-40 window including the Middle East, Central, South and East Asia and elsewhere. He has been learning spiritual resilience throughout his Christian journey and finds that in every stage of life he must lean harder on the Lord, dig deeper into his Word, and pray for the spiritual resources needed to make it through trials with faith, integrity, love, and obedience intact.
