The Promise of Hope, Chapter 8: Resilience

Hi. I’m Edward Griffin, editor in chief of Guideposts and author of the new Guideposts book, The Promise Of Hope, How True Stories Of Hope And Inspiration Saved My Life And How They Can Transform Yours. 

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Resilience is the gift we are given to overcome life’s inevitable setbacks and to continue in our journeys of change. Resilience is one of the most essential ingredients to change and grow because if we can’t bounce back, we can’t go forward. 

One of the great stories that I had the privilege of covering in Guideposts was with an athlete named Lionel Aldridge who played for the Green Bay Packers, really way back when I was a kid. And Lionel was a star. He was always known to be a little bit of a moody player and a little odd. 

After he retired from the Green Bay Packers and after he participated in the first two Super Bowls, which the Packers won under the legendary coach Vince Lombardi, he became a fixture on the Milwaukee scene, and he was a sportscaster and he was a personality, and he headed up charities, and he did a lot of personal appearances. He had a lovely wife and two children, and he also had something else that nobody suspected, and that was schizophrenia. 

And Lionel’s behavior began to deteriorate. He heard voices, he had delusions, he hallucinated, he thought he was being persecuted, eventually lost his family, he lost his job, he lost his career, he lost his adopted hometown of Milwaukee. And he went on an incredible Odyssey around the country as he sort of shed all of the trappings of his life, including his Super Bowl rings, everything except a Bible that he brought with him, which he didn’t know why because he was never a great believer in the Bible. but he’d been brought up in a faithful home. 

And this story centers around Lionel’s epiphany in the Utah desert when it was just him and that Bible and nothing else. It really was one of the most incredible stories that I’ve ever worked on, and I tell about it in this chapter. It’s one of the great wrestling lessons in resilience that I’ve ever heard, and I hope it helps you as well when you read it. 

When we are in the depths of a spiritual crisis and it’s resilience that really pushes us beyond that spiritual crisis, that crisis of faith that so many people have, particularly when they’re trying to change their lives or grow their spirituality. 

And I encountered something so serious in my life that it almost cost me my life. And it was really a couple of years after I had begun to straighten out my life, begun to find myself on a spiritual path of change and transformation and growth. And I was working and I had a pretty good job, and I was sent to Copenhagen, Denmark for a project. 

And it was there in Copenhagen, and unexpectedly, that I really came face to face with myself in a hotel room. And that encounter with myself almost cost me my life, but it also gave me my life because I had a spiritual experience, a deep and profound awakening that I never could have expected. And yet, without it, I probably wouldn’t be here today. And that’s what this chapter is about from my perspective. I hope you enjoy the story and I hope it inspires you. 

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You can order my book by going to Guidepost.org/promieofhope. Check back next week when I’ll share another inspiring Guideposts story from the next chapter of The Promise Of Hope, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about my own story as well. See you then.