Hope For The HopelessSample

Misfits Unite!

If you are a misfit you’ll probably have to do battle with the temptation to become deeply pessimistic.

When you are different from the rest of the world, you see through its shallowness and falsity and fakery and phoniness. And pretty soon you might start to think that everything is shallow and false and fake and phony.

That can make you start to get cynical and skeptical and negative.

Note: There is a lot to be said for being realistic and asking good questions. I’m not asking anyone to become a simple-minded Pollyanna. Asking the right questions can save us from swallowing a pack of lies and deceptions.

But…

The danger of cynicism and skepticism is that they can make you a Grumpy Gus. They can stifle your sense of The Possible. They can turn you into a smug curmudgeon who stares out at the world from an ivory tower and judges everyone else to be ignorant, and therefore only worth ignoring.

And, honestly, it just takes a lot of the fun out of living.

When that happens, it is just another way that the System wins.

The only way to do battle with a debilitating pessimism is to embrace a fanatical optimism.

When you can be absurdly optimistic in the face of all the things that seem to be arrayed against you, you take away all their power to control your emotions, your decisions, and your sense of happiness.

When you see all the falseness of the world your vision no longer is opaque. You can see through it to a deeper and more satisfying dream-ality. You can get a perspective that isn’t limited by this world, but sees a bigger picture.

In the face of everything that might try to bring us down, we can be optimists. Not people who approach life with an empty, plastic smile, but who make a choice to be happy in the face of life’s pain. We can turn situations that are painful into painfuel, driving us onward to our destiny. We don’t react to hardship, we respond to hardship. We are possessed of a kind of cheerful stoicism with a strength that moves heaven and earth.

That’s how my friends and I are approaching life.

We embrace extremism. After all, there’s no such thing as a moderate revolutionary. And Jesus didn’t die to make us safe. He died to make us dangerous.