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I love the God-enabled tenacity of the apostle Paul. Reading an account in Acts 14 kindled a fire in my heart as I returned for an epic hike in the Grand Canyon.

I read in Acts 14:19 that Paul’s enemies stoned him, perceived him as dead, and dragged him outside the city. What happened next became the holy wind beneath my wings for one of the biggest comebacks of my lifetime.

The disciples gathered around Paul’s crumpled, bloody, and seemingly lifeless body. And then? The Bible says Paul got up and went back into the city.

I triple-underlined those words in my Bible. By the grace of God and the enabling of sheer grittiness at the core of Paul’s being, he got up and returned to the place of his thrashing. The next day he moved on.

Seven years ago, my husband and I descended a mere ten paces into the Grand Canyon. My once-athletic body ached to tread this path further, but a twenty-second descent was my limit that day. I was recovering from a very complicated revision of a botched total hip replacement and limping in a boot with freshly torn ligaments in my ankle. With a physically unstable body and my constant companion of pain topping the charts, this was as far as I dared venture into the canyon that day. I cried over the beauty of the canyon, and I cried over standing in a perceived place of defeat. Oh, how I wanted to descend and ascend the trails of that canyon.

A tremendous amount of focused effort has been applied daily for years, and much healing has happened in my broken body. Along the orthopedic healing path, God saw fit to write chronic lymphocytic leukemia into my story. It’s true—I’ve got cancer, but cancer doesn’t have me!

So, by the grace of God and His enabling of sheer grittiness within me, I returned to the canyon in May, seven years later. My husband and I enlisted good friends who live in Arizona and have hiked these trails many times to guide and accompany us. We trained for weeks, super-hydrated for days, dressed wisely, and carried inside our packs what we would need for a strenuous fourteen-mile hike down and up the Grand Canyon.

God is so kind. He enabled me to “get back up,” return to where I once felt pummeled, and make a little victory lap through the Grand Canyon. Determination and tenacity—that get-back-up ability—is gritty and God-given.

Psalm 18:34 talks about how God trains our hands for battle and strengthens our arms to bend a bow of bronze. Grit is grace! All glory to the One who enables us to get back up again.