It’s easy to mistake strength for survival. To think that getting through something — intact, upright, still functioning — is enough. And sometimes it is. Christian strength, the kind we don’t always talk about, is not just about endurance. It’s about being formed. It’s about will and mind working together to become more than what the world tells us we are.
I’ve been thinking lately about what it actually means to be strong — particularly strong in will and mind. Not loud, not domineering, not self-promoting. Just steady. Quietly resilient. Faithful, not because it’s easy, but because it’s right.
The Christian tradition has a long history of valuing fortitude — one of the cardinal virtues. Thomas Aquinas says fortitude is the virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It’s not glamorized, it doesn’t always look pretty or polished. There’s no award for it but it’s the backbone of Christian life. And it lives mostly in the unseen and the unheard and the unnoticed, perhaps even the unvalued.
We live in a culture that trains us to avoid challenge. To step away when things get hard. To numb discomfort, exit tension, find the shortcut. Scripture paints a different picture. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Paul says in Romans 12:2. That’s not just about positive thinking. It’s about will — choosing again and again to hold fast to truth, especially when it would be easier to drift.
Strength of will is choosing not to return fire with fire, to still your reaction, not to retaliate.
Strength of mind is refusing to let failure define your worth. I really wish more women would hear that statement.
Both are trained — not inherited. They’re cultivated slowly, often painfully, in the hard places of life, in the shadows and darker moments that we burden in secret.
I think we need to talk more about this kind of strength in Christian life. Not just the strength to believe, but the strength to keep believing when belief feels costly. Not just the will to follow Christ, but the will to keep following when the path is unclear, unpopular, or painful. The strength to hold the tension between grace and truth, conviction and compassion, suffering and hope.
Some people assume that faith is a kind of escape — a way to avoid the hard stuff. But I would say that if anything, faith calls us deeper into it. Christianity doesn’t bypass suffering; it gives it meaning. Christ doesn’t invite us to a life of ease — he invites us to carry a cross. Not because he is cruel, but because real love, real growth, real resurrection, always comes through struggle. And these are Easter days when we bask in the glow of the resurrection.
The good news is, we don’t do it alone. We are not called to be strong on our own terms. The strength we are given is not ours to conjure — it’s ours to receive. “My grace is sufficient for you,” Paul was told. “For my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Maybe that’s the paradox we have to live with: the strongest people aren’t the ones who never falter. They’re the ones who’ve learned to trust a strength beyond themselves.
So no, it’s not just about “getting through.”
It’s about who you become in the process.
And more importantly — who you let shape you.
Sit with that thought.
The Female Theologian 