86 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY to a standard of goodness. In the Christian tradition, this goodness is present in and determined by God. In turn, God expects His imagebearers to display the same goodness.41 Yet, since mankind holds natural proclivities toward sin and since virtue is acquired over time, this brings the discussion back to the idea of sanctification. Other ways of stating this from a biblical perspective would include the ideas of holiness, spiritual maturation, and progress in faith. This progress is precisely where resilience finds its place. FUNDAMENTALS OF BOUNCING BACK: RESILIENCE STUDIES Meadows, Miller, and Robson state that “Theories of resilience have been influenced by multiple disciplines.”42 They note that while there is no universally accepted definition, “resilience is generally defined as the ability of an individual to ‘bounce back’ after experiencing stress.”43 The American Psychological Association defines it as "the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands."44 Ann Masten clarifies that resilience is “characterized by good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development.”45 A surprising conclusion to resilience research is that resilience is not made up of one or two or even a few attributes or resources in a person. Instead, resilience is “multifaceted,” more easily understood as a complex set of skills, processes, and resources a person might take advantage of to cope with and bounce back from stress, trauma, or crises.46 Moreover, resilience is differentiated in the literature from the concept of recovery.47 Recovery refers to a return to equilibrium after an extended period of languishing symptoms such as “depression or posttraumatic stress disorder.”48 Resilience, however, “reflects the ability to maintain a stable equilibrium” in the face of adversity.49 This was initially seen as a unique attribute of people with special characteristics or resources. Masten points out that “expecting extraordinary qualities in resilient individuals implied that ordinary adaptive resources and systems were not enough,” and that this perspective may have stemmed from “deficit models of psychopathology.”50 This is the legacy of Freudian psychology at work.
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