This morning my kids were crazy people. There must be a full moon or something because they were more werewolves than people. Just crying a lot and fighting, generally being stressful. And it really was a stressful morning. A stressful stimulus.

My wife was more in the middle of it than I was, I was doing dishes and getting my work day started and all the sudden she came in at her wit’s end, teary-eyed. She said “I just can’t be in there [the playroom] anymore.” Next the two youngest ran out screaming “WHERE’S MOM!!!???”

It was just a lot.

After we calmed the storm and I left the house to start my day, I pondered the morning. Why did that go so badly? Why do things go badly sometimes? Why doesn’t God make life easy?

What’s this got to do with Adaptation?

Well, I have been thinking a lot about strength training lately. The stress to the body, or stimulus. The rest and adaptation that happens to heal and allow for more load next session. Without the stimulus there is no adaptation in the world of strength training. These thoughts are bouncing around my head as I ponder the difficulties of the morning and it hit me.

Maybe the stress, recover, adapt model is not just for physical change? Maybe this is how all change in life happens?

What if God, wanting to “strengthening us (our character, our patience, our joy, our reliance on him)” provides a stimulus, allows us to recover and facilitates the desired adaptation?

For a stimulus to be helpful in strength training it has to be “recoverable” or in other words, it cannot to be so stressful that excessive damage is done to the system. I think life is like this sometimes. I think the stresses of life can be excessive and can damage the system.

But like our bodies, small and calculated stimuli over time with proper recovery make those previously damaging stresses very doable or even easy.

In life there are equivalents to being hydrated, eating enough calories generally (and protein specifically) and sleeping enough. These are the factors that affect physical recovery. If these are dialed in, you will recover. In life, these things are more subtle. Maybe time with friends, time alone, laughing, going outside, watching a movie are the things that our emotional and spiritual selves need to rest and being in the Word is the “nutrition” that we need to recover from the stimuli around us.

These are new thoughts and half-baked ones but I feel that there are some principles at play. Maybe our characters are being strengthened and the hard times are actually intended to be useful stresses.