Resilience

I am surprised it's almost been a year since I last posted. I made a small personal goal during General Conference to do better at recording my thoughts here, since I do like to share my impressions and not just keep them in my little written journal. Keeping them on a blog makes them easier for me to search personally, and I hope is a good way to share the light of the gospel. I like this quote from "The Chosen" that I wrote down years ago -

'If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.' —  Chaim Potok 

So, once a week might be too ambitious but I think I'll shoot high and then if I only get two posts, that's better than a goal of 1 and making it. Also, I'm going to try to put the things we talk about during scriptures here, and that way, if the kids do remember anything about what we taught and someday want to look it up again, they'll be able to look here to maybe find it.

So - for Come Follow Me this week, we read about the Whole Armor of God in Ephesians. I shared those verses last night, along with the first part of this talk by Lynn G. Robbins - Resilience- Spiritual Armor for Today's Youth.

The story is told that during British rule of colonial India, an unacceptable number of venomous cobras lived in and around Delhi. To solve the problem, local authorities began paying a bounty for dead cobras. The ill-advised bounty backfired when enterprising locals began breeding cobras for profit. When the bounty ended, the breeders set the cobras free, further compounding the problem. The phenomenon of unintended side effects sometimes causing more harm than intended benefits is known as the “cobra effect.”

The Cobra Effect on the Rising Generation - 
During my visit to Brigham Young University–Idaho in the fall of 2017, the school’s new president, Henry J. Eyring, told me that his foremost concern was the high dropout rate of college freshmen. Students leave college for a variety of reasons, but a lack of resilience is one of the leading reasons that many universities across the United States are experiencing this same challenge. 

Resilience is “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” Discovering a lack of resilience among its recruits, the U.S. Army started offering the Master Resilience Training program to fortify soldiers against the stress, demands, and hardships of military service. 

We face the same concern in the Church with a higher percentage of full-time missionaries returning home early from their missions than in previous generations. Some missionaries face serious health challenges or other trials that necessitate early releases, but others simply may not have developed enough of the virtue of resilience. Lyle J. Burrup, who served as a mental health counselor in the Church’s Missionary Department, has observed that the most common cause of emotional problems faced by missionaries is a lack of resilience. “In many cases,” he says, “the missionary just hadn’t learned how to deal with challenges well.” 

Universities, the military, and the mission field aren’t causing the problem; they are simply revealing it. Lower resilience among today’s youth may actually be an unintended consequence—a modern-day cobra effect—resulting from such factors as:

•  Too much time on the couch and on digital devices, and not as much exercise and physical activity as earlier generations.
•  Too much exposure to an unrealistic virtual or pretend world, causing distorted self-images, anxiety, depression, and lower self-esteem.
•  Impatience in a world of instant gratification and answers at Google speed. (Conversely, resilience is developed in great part through the virtue of patience.) 
•  Protection from rough seas. “Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.”8 A world with infinite options that distract, disparate voices that confuse, and a life of ease that can desensitize youth and adults to the things of the Spirit. 
•  Too much digital face time and not enough face-to-face time, resulting in underdeveloped interpersonal skills. 

Many books have been written addressing this complex and formidable challenge, including one with the telling title iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. The world is changing. The Lord has reserved for today spirits who are capable of thriving in the face of today’s challenges. Our charge as nurturing parents is to help prepare them to meet those challenges head on by cultivating and encouraging their resilience, faith, and fortitude. With powerful gospel principles to assist us, we can help youth strengthen their resilience, enabling them to become more like the Savior by “increas[ing] in wisdom [intellectually] and stature [physically and mentally], and in favour with God [spiritually] and man [socially and emotionally]” (Luke 2:52). I want to discuss four these gospel principles: (1) self-reliance, (2) opposition in all things, (3) the gift of the Holy Ghost, and (4) moral agency.

So the rest of that article is really good too. Corey and I are doing our best to make sure out kids have a sure foundation.