Hope For The HopelessSample

Rebel Against Hopelessness

There is a lot about life that is confusing and painful. Stuff that just doesn’t make much sense to me. I am left with a whole bunch of questions:

• Why do I have to see suffering so close-up?
• Why do I sometimes feel so sad that I can’t cry?
• Why did I get beat by chronic depression for ten years?
• And why did I smile like everything was fine?

I used to be a flaming optimist. I was always happy and upbeat. A veritable lump of sunshine. Life was a party.

And then, in the middle of my senior year of high school, my perfect world came crashing down around my ears. The truth about how harsh this world can be finally caught up with me.

I can’t even tell you exactly what went wrong.

I had lived many years with a carefully applied smile on the outside while I was dying on the inside. In fact, I really wanted to die. I toyed with the thought of suicide and about how I might most effectively accomplish such a task.

My faith in God began to vanish, and Christianity began to seem fake.

When I got honest with my friends, I found that they were struggling in the same way. They didn’t know how to integrate the dark thoughts and realizations about life into their day-to-day experiences. They couldn’t make sense of the pain. And the form of faith they learned in church didn’t offer much help either.

Are these really the only two options? I asked myself. Being a gloomy agnostic or a simpleminded Christian? There has to be a third alternative, right? A way of looking at life that embraces authentic hope and ultimate meanings, while at the same time isn’t afraid to be honest about the pain and confusion and misery that we sometimes experience in the course of living as a human being?

Well, I stumbled upon the third alternative.

It’s what I refer to as being an Optimisfit.

As the name implies, it is someone who embraces his or her misfit identity and doesn’t neatly fit inside the comfortable religious box…but who manages to hold on to a wildly optimistic view of life even in the face of all the darkness around us. The Optimisfit knows that life doesn’t come with nice, neat right angles.

No, life is messy and wild.

And so are the Optimisfits.

We love God, but we want to live in a different kind of way.

We want to rebel against both the culture of hopelessness… and against the culture of “vanilla-flavored Churchianity.”

That’s how we roll…