RESPONDING TO STRESS
RESILIENCY AND COMPLIANCE
My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. – James 1:2-4
From time to time, we experience circumstances that require us to “bounce back.” Life’s collisions come in many forms, whether failure, a personal attack, or an unpleasant circumstance. While James encourages us to recruit such trials as opportunities, Peter also adds that we should actually expect these, rather than regarding “fiery trials” as strange (1 Peter 4:12-13). This is a component of Christian maturity: recognizing that we are to cultivate character rather than to crave comfort. But how can we be so resilient in a world that defeats and demoralizes so many? And is resilience always beneficial?
In the physics of materials, resiliency is the capacity for a substance to recover its shape when deformed by stress. The stress may be compressive (such as a basketball striking the floor), or tensile (such as a bungee cord being pulled to secure a load), and causes a strain, meaning that it is shortened or elongated relative to its resting position. If, on a graph, one plots the stress against the strain, there is, up to a point, a direct (straight line) correlation. One can regard this either as the stress causing the strain, or as the strain storing up a reactive stress in order to restore the material when the stress is removed. This straight line slope, the ratio of change in stress to change in strain, is known as “Young’s Modulus” for a 
material. It is described as a force per cross-sectional area, much like a pressure (in pounds per square inch, or psi). A steep slope indicates a high Young’s Modulus value, meaning that a large stress is required to cause a small strain, or again one might think conversely that a very small strain generates a very large reactive stress for restoration. A very rigid material thus has a high Y value: Copper has a value of 17 million psi, whereas steel produces 29 million psi, tungsten 59 million psi, and diamond, the hardest known material, over 150 million psi. More “elastic” materials such as nylon only provide a Y value of 0.29 to 0.58 million psi (290,000 to 580,000), and rubber’s value is in the low thousands: extremely elastic.
Interestingly, though, the Y value for a material is a measure of ridigity, which is not the only path to resilience. Both rubber and steel recover to their original shapes after the deforming force is removed. So we find that resilience can be accomplished in two diverse ways: by giving a lot, or by giving a little, as long as the material is not permanently deformed. It is possible for some hard materials (such as lead) or soft materials (like clay or wet chewing gum) to be moved quickly beyond their straight-line stress-to-strain behavior, such that they begin to deform more easily and, soon after, permanently. This property is compliance, the opposite of resiliency. Compliance basically means that the straight-line portion of the graph does not persist for very long, yet the material remains intact, without fracture, even as it is deformed further. If something is very compliant, it undergoes “plastic deformation” through a very long rightmost portion of the graph.
Now it would seem that resiliency is an admirable characteristic for an individual to have, and that different individuals can recover from hardships in different ways. The stoic person, like steel, is strong and seemingly immovable: life’s adverse ammunition seems to just bounce off. I think of the toughness of Paul, who rolled up his sleeves in serving up the gospel message: “We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed…” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). But the emotional, artistic person, like rubber, can be equally as resilient, deeply affected by circumstances, yet bouncing back nonetheless. I think of David, whose prayers were often a combination of calling out to God while talking himself through the circumstance: “Why are you cast down, O my soul? And why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; For I shall yet praise Him, The help of my countenance and my God” (Psalm 42:5,11, 43:5).
But is such resiliency, which we might call strength of character, always good? For both Paul and David, their different manners of response nonetheless had in common that their strength and hope was in the Lord. In this manner, resiliency is admirable. Yet if one is strong without the Lord, this instead is self-sufficiency, which is deceitfully empty. The person strong without the Lord is preserving himself or herself, surely enough, but it is the flesh—worldliness—that is being sustained. So what is the mechanism by which a person is 
beneficially deformed—that is, transformed, or shaped—so that he or she will not bounce back into a lifestyle, character, or mindset that is deficient of what he or she should be?
That mechanism is compliance, and there are three ways that compliance can be accomplished. The first two are the difficult ways: If something is rigid, it can be made compliant with enough pressure. Rigid metals are indeed “malleable,” but take their new shapes only through immense forces, being stamped out with a yet harder die, or rolled out, or hammered, or inscribed. If something is elastic, it can be made compliant through heat, allowing its molecules to be “reset” in a new position. Sometimes it takes great pressure or heat, figuratively, to bring about a necessary change in us. It is not always preferable to bounce back, but instead to be altered. When we recognize this, we can, through a small yielding of the spirit, become a new material—something entirely compliant. This is the third and least difficult mechanism of change: becoming as wet clay before God. After all, this is what we were in our initial formation: A person does not resist being fashioned from a single cell in his mother’s womb. Our early lives were all about compliance, until the sinful condition began emerging in our wills.
So are we to be steel, rubber, or clay? The answer lies not only in our temperament, but in the context of what we are responding to. With regard to the stresses and influences of the world, we are to be resilient, “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58). “You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). We are to put on the armor of God (Ephesians 6:11-18). And in this resilience toward worldliness, we must maintain compliance toward God: “Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). We are to be resilient toward lies, whether as steel or as rubber, but compliant toward truth, like clay. It is too easy to get these backwards, becoming naturally resilient toward God himself, resisting change on one hand, while behaving with compliance toward worldliness and allowing destructive molding on the other. Hard-heartedness toward God requires a painful working of pressure or etching just to become affected. Jeremiah 17:1 notes that due to this condition, “the sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron; With the point of a diamond it is engraved on the tablet of their heart….”
By contrast, Isaiah 64:8 declares “But now, O LORD, You are our Father; We are the clay, and You our potter; And all we are the work of Your hand.” Jeremiah experienced this in a first-hand object lesson:
Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter?” saith the LORD. “Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel.” – Jeremiah 18:3-6
To be reworked and reformed as clay is not glamorous, and flies in the face of the self-made-man ethic—the worldly view of greatness or strength. The “selfish ambition” that Paul decries (Philippians 1:16, 2:3) is admirable to many, and is so because it invites admiration. But when we are molded as God desires, the admiration is moved from the material to the One who fashioned it. In the very passage mentioned earlier, in which Paul declared his resilience in the Lord’s strength, he first spoke of the treasure of the glory of God: “…we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us…” (2 Corinthians 4:7, NIV).
So we can, and must be, resilient—in the world but “not of the world” (John 15:19, 17:14,16). This is ensured by our walking in the Spirit of God’s truth, though it is a growth and conditioning process. An oak tree limb loaded by its own weight, and perhaps the additional mass of a tree house, will actually grow its cells to different lengths to create a sort of compressive arch within the wood, making it yet stronger for the future. Similarly, bones take shape over time based on the way we use the attached muscles, becoming specialized to resist compression. Concrete can be “pre-stressed” with cables so that it has greater tensile strength that it would otherwise have. And by pummeling the surface of an automobile spring with tiny wire pieces (shot peening, as shown above) or pounding a sword with a round hammer (ball peening), surface irregularities create lateral stresses that resist surface fracture more than if these surfaces were smooth. All the evil in life that we must deal with does indeed “have its perfect work,” when we are patient, even when it pummels, presses, or pock-marks us up.
Yet concurrently we must be compliant—being “transformed by the renewing of our mind” (Romans 12:2). Our toughness through God should melt like wax before God.
© 2010 Chard Berndt.
All Scriptures NKJV unless otherwise indicated.
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