Sometimes overseas, I felt like a stretched-out rubber band. I felt the loss of any emotional elasticity to pop back into place, to be okay again.

Maybe it was the small, daily stresses: the whole family trading sicknesses for six months. Or constant traffic stops and pressure to pay a bribe. Or the miles of shacks lining the highway.

So I was surprised to recently learn that developing a resilience to “return to joy” is a key part of infant development.

Christian psychologists James Friesen and others explain one of the key tasks for infants is learning joy as their normal state—as well as building their “joy strength.” It’s “the drive to withstand the world’s assaults, and to become the persons we were intended to be;” to “achieve wholeness in a fractured world.”

No wonder Nehemiah calls joy our superpower as Christians (Nehemiah 8:10).

They suggest an infant who doesn’t learn how to return to joy from every unpleasant emotion can experience a chronic inability to regulate emotion. Maybe that’s from finding a reassuring place in a parent’s arms in light of fear, sadness, or pain—or simply from being “the sparkle in someone’s eye,” something some neuroscientists now believe to be the basic human need.

I love this little Gospel-packet: We have a scientific need to be loved simply for who we are. Not for what we do.

For grace.

David pleads with God, “Keep me as the apple of your eye” (Psalm 17:8). God designed that through glimpses of His love, relying on Him, on relationships and community, we learn to relocate joy. We get our bounce back.

I don’t feel the need to over spiritualize this. If you’ve been worn out by overseas traumas or indescribable grief over the effects of poverty and injustice, I’m not saying you just need to gaze at God’s love and all will be well. But in my experience, allowing tangible experiences with that unconditional delight in us helps rebuild my joy-strength. Perhaps that’s via a therapist, sleep and medicine for my body, or laughter hard enough to make milk shoot out my nose.

What personal, penetrating demonstrations of God’s love could your resilience use?