Are You Surviving or Overcoming?

Hi friends - Rebekah Lyons here! From New York City to Franklin, Tennessee, God has taken me on a healing journey through panic disorder, anxiety, and depression. His kindness and provision have been evident through it all, teaching me the message and impact of emotional health and building a life of resilience, I am called to share today.

I’m a momma to four: Cade, Pierce, Kennedy, and Joy. My eldest, Cade, was diagnosed with Down syndrome six hours after birth. While that transformed our lives, we had no idea how God would pave the way for our eventual adoption of Joy, a little girl from China with Down syndrome, seventeen years later. Pierce and Kennedy are the glue that holds our family together. They are wise beyond their years from their sacrifice toward Cade and Joy and both love God with their whole heart. 

These past few years the message of resilience has been on my heart more than ever.

It was a dark season, and I never wrote about it online or spoke about it in public. When I began to research adversity three years ago, I never dreamed I'd experience my greatest struggles of motherhood, twenty-two years into being a mom. I finally put words to paper in Building a Resilient Life.

It all began when Cade had a meltdown that quickly escalated and required immediate intervention. For the next eighteen months, Cade’s anxiety and defiance turned inward, resisting every turn, slamming his head into windows and walls at mealtime and his headboard at bedtime. We sought counsel from doctors, psychologists, and family therapists, as my insomnia reached an all-time high, whispering chronic prayers for rescue and peace.

Sometimes I glimpsed a momentary breakthrough when I knelt close, whispered, and waited. “Mommy loves Cade, do you want a hug?” In those patient, quiet moments Cade would start bawling and let me hold him. When he wept, I saw him fully. I saw the rest of us fully. Cade expressed what many of us were feeling. Breaking under the weight of change and loss.

This book and study is based on Romans 5:3–4

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. 

We’ve all walked through adversity these last few years. I wonder what trials you are facing? What weariness are you enduring? What overwhelm are you buried under? What I know now, is that adversity awakens. It awakens us to what we’re capable of and what’s worth fighting for. 

I am so grateful you are on this journey, we can’t do it alone so grab a friend or two and get ready to build lives of resilience.

Written for Devotionals Daily by Rebekah Lyons, author or Building a Resilient Life.

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