Lockdown day 7: Resilience and Scrabble

Being resilient means having a way of coping when there is so much going on in our lives that is overwhelming. Sometimes it can feel as though it is one thing after another. Sometimes it is lots happening simultaneously.

There are 2 ways of dealing with this that remind me of Scrabble. The first is to focus on one thing. Maybe it’s that triple word score that you could take ownership of, if you could just use your letters to connect the triple word score to the existing word network on the board. The rest of the network is immaterial and we focus on that key area to maximise our score. All our energy is focused on that one aspect. When there is a lot going on simultaneously, it can help to compartmentalise. Separate out one thing we CAN do and temporarily suspend our concerns about the rest. Start with something that can be dealt with easily so that there is a sense of achievement to take into the next task.

The second is to step back and look at the bigger picture. If we take the first approach, we can sometimes be so bogged down in firefighting small elements that we fail to see common themes. If we have a series of Scrabble tiles all jumbled together in front of us, it seems like gobbledygook. None of it makes sense until we shuffle the letters around, see if they fit together in different ways. Then we may start to see a pattern that makes a word. Similarly, there may be a pattern in our collection of overwhelming issues and we just need to shuffle them around to make sense of it. Maybe there is a common cause for each issue and addressing that will positively impact a number of areas. Felling tired, overweight, tetchy…. maybe I need to look at diet and exercise to solve all of those issues in my life. Relationship issues with A,B,C…. maybe I need to look at how I word criticism to positively impact all those relationships.  Concerns about X,Y,Z…. maybe I need to hand those worries to the Lord and ask for His solutions, wisdom, insight, discernment.

God bless! 


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