Resilience through the Storms of Life

When the storms strip everything back, resilience begins where what’s buried comes to light.

Welcome to The Resilient Series—a collection of reflections from wise, faith-filled voices exploring what it means to live resilient in Jesus. Each week, we’ll hear from a different writer—authors, pastors, coaches, neurosurgeons, and everyday disciples—sharing their stories, Scripture insights, and hard-won hope. Whether you’re arriving here at the start or joining partway through, each piece stands alone and invites you to draw near to the God who strengthens us through every season.

Storms have a way of revealing what’s hidden. They don’t just disrupt the surface; they dig deep—exposing what’s been buried beneath for years. In this third instalment of The Resilient Series, Desiree Taylor shares how her journey with hearing loss, pain, and faith became a living metaphor for this truth. From taunts in the school corridor to waves crashing on a New England shore, her story reminds us that resilience isn’t found in avoiding life’s storms but in meeting God right in the middle of them—where what’s exposed can finally be healed.

Life is full of storms. Some are small squalls, others are hurricane formed, and still others are tornados that come through and ravage our hearts, homes, and lives.

One of the first big storms of my life when the doctors began seeing a hearing loss forming in me. My mom was deaf and had a progressive sensorineural hearing loss but there wasn’t any thought by my parents about the fact that it could be genetically passed on. I received my first hearing aid at the age of 9.

I remember walking into school with this new gadget in my ear, and there was a realization in me that this hearing aid officially made me different. Soon after, the boys especially began taunting me about my speech. I would walk by to the sounds of them talking in a nasally slur as though they needed to show me just how awkward I sounded.

I decided after that to throw that hearing aid right into my elementary school steel locker and figure this out another way. I remember the sting of reality as I sat in the classroom and struggled to understand what was going on.

Resilience in that moment was staring at the teacher or whatever person was talking and learning how to lipread.

This was all around the time I began asking God to show me Himself. I grew up in a Baptist Church and went to school with kids mainly from the Catholic Church, and things weren’t lining up for me. So I just said out loud, “this isn’t adding up, who are you?”

God faithfully answered that prayer, and I asked Jesus into my heart.

Not only was I different because of my hearing,
I was now different for being a Christian too.

Elementary school ended, middle school flew by, and High School came. Some of my more challenging times were in this season. I was trying to understand who God said I was, while fighting all the voices around me at home, school, and church that contradicted what He said. I took my biggest hearing loss drop in my senior year of High School. I became depressed and felt very alone in life.

At that point I told God I really didn’t believe Him and walked away for a time into a tornado of a storm. This time of life was tumultuous and very damaging, leaving behind a trail of devastation, adding more layers to my pain, trauma, and loss.

We live in New England, and we are pretty famous for hurricanes up here. One year while I was a late teenager, we had a pretty bad one. I remember going down to the beach after the storm. It was dark outside. I liked going down to watch the ocean and hear the waves crashing. I felt close to God there and I was reminded of His power in a very awe-striking kind of way. This particular night as I went down there, I saw shadows and shapes of strange things sticking out of the sand. It was incredibly creepy.

As I began to explore and research more of what I was seeing, I began to realize there were several old cars, and other treasures sticking their heads out of the sand. It scared me and took me a minute to process what was happening. The storm had stripped away so much sand, it caused stuff that was buried underneath to come to the surface and stick out, exposing it for all to see.

I have found the same to be true in the storms of life. Through these storms, especially the bigger ones, they have exposed what has been buried underneath. Some of those cars had been there for a very long time. Much of the stuff buried in our hearts has been there for a very long time too. God uses these storms in life to show us what has been buried and needs to come to the surface.

Resilience and perseverance, sits with what is exposed. It brings it to Jesus, and does the hard work of acknowledging, accepting, repenting, and working towards healing and towing all of it out of there.

Each storm I have gone through and the ones I continue to go through continue to dig up lies from the enemy I have believed, wounded pieces, wrong thoughts, anger, bitterness, and unforgiveness.

Each piece I have to bring to Jesus. This is the key to living a resilient life. Being willing to face the hard truths about ourselves and what is in our hearts. The enemy tells us that it is easier and less painful to sit in it, to walk around like it doesn’t exists, or to stay with what is familiar. The reality is it is painful to acknowledge these truths. It is painful to do the work, but just like Jesus faced the cross for the joy of what is to come, so is for us.

When we are willing to see the stuff sticking out of the sand of our hearts, do the work of digging it out with Jesus, we will be able to look out and see a beautifully, restored, and peaceful beach.

I can testify that God is faithful, He has been with me through the painful process, and He has been there to celebrate the victories and freedom with me, and He will be that for you.

Let me be a friend who cheers you on. Life is hard, and it is tempting to give up, but we can’t. God has so much for you, my friend. I am here to affirm the truth that there is joy on the other side.

“Therefore since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” Hebrews 12:1-3

Desiree’s words invite us to stop hiding what the storms have unearthed and to let God do His restoring work. Resilience, she reminds us, isn’t about toughness—it’s about tenderness. It’s the courage to sit with what’s been exposed, to bring it before Jesus, and to believe that beauty can rise again from what once felt buried. May her story be a mirror for your own: evidence that even when the winds roar and the sand shifts, God is faithful to rebuild what the storm reveals.

Next week is a guest post from Brandon Robinson.