by Ben Courson
So just get over it.
Otherwise all the fun will keep getting sapped out of your life.
We have been forgiven. We need to forgive.
As Elsa from Frozen sings, “Let it go.”
As is so often the case, Jesus had the perfect story to get us thinking straight about forgiveness. There was once this master who forgave his servant 10,000 talents (that’s a lot of money in ancient near-Eastern financial terms). In fact, someone has calculated that if you were to break this much money into coins that it would require an army of 8,600 men, each carrying a 60-pound sack, forming a line five miles long to carry it. But this servant had a fellow who owed him a trifling 100 denarii (that’s not much more than Taco Bell meal money—literally pocket change). Fresh off being forgiven his own debt he shows up at this other dude’s door and demands his 100 denarii. He threatens him with legal action. This man had a Bill Gates-sized debt, yet he wouldn’t forgive the pocket change. Of course, the master was furious.
When we consider the forgiveness that God has extended to us, we should realize that we have no right to demand recompense for the pocket change worth of grievances done toward us by others.
Toss the ledger in the mental garbage pail. No need to carry that around, or store it in the mental attic.
All fine and good, some cynics might say. Easy for you to talk about forgiveness. You don’t know what it’s like to be betrayed.
Actually, I know exactly what it feels like.
It’s terrible to get lied to and cheated on. It is awful to be stabbed in the back and abandoned by people you love. It’s no fun to be gossiped about or turned on or ripped off in a business venture. Like you, I’ve been hurt by people. Not in an abstract sense either. Really.
Everyone on the Jesus path is going to have to deal with a deep wound like this at some point. It’s part of living on the planet. There is always a Judas waiting to turn you over to your enemies…after he lays a kiss on you.
Do we turn bitter, or do we grow through what we go through?
When we stand at the crossroads, an Optimisfit chooses the way of the cross.
We’ll all be a lot happier if we learn to forgive one another. “Blessed,” said Jesus, “are the merciful.” According to research from the Mayo Clinic, letting go of grudges can make way for greater happiness, health, and peace. It can lead to lower blood pressure, a stronger immune system, and improved heart health. Showing mercy to others can even help our bodies fight off sickness.
Lewis Smedes once wrote, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was you.”
How much un-forgiveness are you packing around? Enough to fit in a wallet? A backpack? Or would it take a wheelbarrow? In any case, do you really want to be hauling that baggage around everywhere you go? Or stuff it into your already crowded mental attic?
Just let it go.
27
JUST SHOOT
If I had been at Columbine and the shooter had looked me in the eye and said, “I’m gonna kill you if you’re a Christian. Are you a Christian?” I might have to hem and haw and respond, “Well…it’s complicated.”
When you talk about the religion of Christianity you are bringing in all the baggage of the Crusades and the Witch Trials and the wars between Protestants and Catholics and the wars between Protestants and other Protestants and the crooked TV evangelists and the people who sell salvation like it was an Amway product and the talking heads who confuse faith with political agendas and the hypocrites and the phonies and all the various smug and self-righteous zealots.
Yes, it is complicated.
But if the same gunman looked me in the eye and said, “I’m gonna kill you if you are a child of God. Are you a child of God?” then I would just smile and say, “Yes. Shoot me now.”
I would die for a title like that. I would die for Him.
Proudly.
And fearlessly.
28
FRANKL’S SEARCH FOR MEANING
Another of my Optimisfit heroes was a psychoanalyst by the name of Viktor Frankl.
Frankl suffered the full wrath of Auschwitz and Dachau, living through the horror of those Nazi extermination camps, and knowing that any day could be his last. But he managed to survive and live to tell his story. And that almost unimaginably terrible experience made a huge difference in how he thought about life.
On the other side of his experiences in the concentration camp, Frankl developed a theory of psychology that asserted that our primary motivation in life can be found in our search for meaning. He noticed that the people who didn’t give up in the camps were the people who kept finding meaning in their lives and a reason to go on. Those that didn’t find a meaning for their lives mostly gave up the fight and let themselves be crushed by their experience. He argued that we have means, but no meaning, and we have enough to live by, but not enough to live for.
Life, he asserted, was not a quest for pleasure, as Freud had propagated with his obsession about infantile sexuality, Oedipus complexes, and daddy issues. Nor was it a quest for power, as Alfred Adler had proposed. It was a quest for meaning. Therefore, the greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.
Frankl believed that all of us are hardwired for meaning—that we all need a purpose for our existence. He believed a person could find meaning in work (doing something significant), in love (deeply caring for other people), and in finding courage during difficult times.
Once, while teaching a college course, he opened the time up for questions. One of the students asked him if he could articulate, in a single sentence, the meaning of his own life. Frankl took a piece of paper and jotted down one brief sentence. Then he asked his students to guess what he had written.
After a few quiet moments of uncomfortable silence, one student raised his hand and offered this guess: “The meaning of your life is to help others find meaning in theirs.”
“Those are the very words I wrote,” said Frankl.
He went on to write his most famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in just nine days. It is a book that has helped many people discover that life is not meaningless, but that meaning is made every day by the way we choose to live our lives. It is a book bursting with hope. A hard-earned hope, forged in the crucible of the most horrifying circumstances. It is a reminder that no matter how dark things look, we can always find something beautiful and eternal in their midst.
Suffering, in and of itself, is meaningless. We give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it.
“Man,” he wrote, “is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Israel on his lips.”
That’s not just some sort of positive thinking. That’s fire.
That’s the courage of the Optimisfit.
That is our passion to help others find the meaning that will make their lives more than just endurable, it will make their lives sing.
My dream doesn’t change when my circumstances change. We choose our responses. We create them. They don’t create us.
The enemy whispers in my ear: “You can’t survive the storm.”
I whisper back to him, “I am the storm.”
29
A CAVEAT
Just to be clear, I’m not setting myself up as some perfect example of how to live.
Believe me, I have my issues. Lots of them.
I’ve been accused of suffering from OCD. But I have two responses to that. First, I’m not suffering. I just embrace that as part of who I am. And second, if you must label my tendencies, then let’s agree that I have CDO, because I am more comfortable with having the letters of the ailment in neat alphabetical order like they are supposed to be.
So…
I was a pretty terrible student in school and I don’t have as many degrees as a thermometer behind my name. And I probably have as many IQ points as the Cleveland Browns normally put o
n the scoreboard.
One of my biggest weaknesses is the problem I have had with anger. When I get mad, I tend to get really mad and say and do things I am not proud of later. I’m not halfway with anything, including anger.
Want to make something of that?!
In high-school basketball I led the league in technical fouls. I was John McEnroe when the call went against me, arguing and stomping around and punching the wall.
This is made even more embarrassing because my team was the only Christian school in the conference. Great example I was setting, huh?
I’m not going to make excuses. I take all this seriously, and I am doing the work I need to do to change. I’m getting there, even if a little slowly. The good news is that God has been able to use me in so many ways despite these—and other—imperfections.
The thing that causes me to flare up in anger so easily is probably related to the thing that makes me passionate and driven. I just need to figure out how to make sure I am using my emotion in a healthy way.
Thankfully, I have a Squad walking alongside me through life that is not afraid to keep me honest. They know how to defuse my occasional anger with a good dose of loving ridicule. I get mad and they laugh at me. It’s kind of amazing how laughter totally takes all the wind out of anger.
But really, could we just rename my condition as CDO?
I’d feel better about that.
30
THE UNEDITED ME
My friends have a lot to put up with in me.
I have an unfortunate tendency to act a little cocky or overly self-confident. Sometimes I am a poor listener and too anxious to get my thoughts expressed rather than giving an ear to others. I am impatient with people I find boring or who give off a religious vibe. If you aren’t real around me I may react in a way that isn’t too kind. And my impatience with others—and often with myself—leads me to struggle with getting angry a little too quickly and a little too passionately.
These are some of the flaws that—for better or worse—make me who I am.
One of the things that religious people are worried about is looking good for their religious peers. To gain respect in the religious world often means demonstrating that you are a better Christian than any of the other Christians; in short, that you are good at following the rules and living up to the expectations. You don’t have to be a believer very long to catch on to what you need to do and say if you want to be thought of as a good Christian.
Of course, that means, among other things, covering up who you really are. Keeping your faults well hidden. I mean, you can show some insignificant faults, but make sure nobody sees your deep struggles and failings, the things you battle against nearly every day that make you feel like you aren’t making much progress. Keeping the real you out of sight.
Perception is reality in the religious world, so you need to maintain the façade.
Which frankly, I have learned is way more trouble than it is worth.
Of course, it isn’t just religious people who are overly focused on image—on creating a perception of who you are that isn’t really based in reality. Where would social media be if it weren’t such a powerful tool for creating an idealized image of who each of us are? On Facebook and Twitter and Instagram we can carefully construct an image of who we want people to think we are by carefully choosing just the right pictures (probably digitally enhanced), videos, well-thought out and cleverly constructed statements, and posts that show we are hip and cool and interesting…and that our lives are better than most people’s lives.
It’s all just a big game. And it takes way too much energy to keep it going.
So, I’m just going to try to be myself—warts and all—and accept that some people won’t find me acceptable.
I have lots of flaws.
I’ve tried to be as honest as I could in this book. I wanted you to see the unedited version of me.
And I take comfort in Paul’s words, “If I must boast I will boast of the things that show my weakness” (2 Corinthians 11:30 NIV).
Here is where I take great hope. I am not the sum of my flaws and failings. I can choose to see myself as God—who sees me better and more fully than anyone—sees me.
According to the Bible, I am light. I am a temple for the Holy Spirit. I am a citizen of Heaven. I am seated in heavenly places. I am His workmanship, His masterpiece, His poem. I am the pearl of great price that the Master of Heaven would bankrupt His Kingdom to buy.
Where I am weak, He is strong.
That is who I am.
I refuse to let other people define who I am or what I should do or how I should think.
Proverbs 29:25 tells us that the fear of man is a snare. Worrying too much about what others think will trap you. It is inevitable that some people aren’t going to like you. The people who applaud your coronation might well be the same people who applaud your execution.
Many of the same people shouting “Hosanna” when Jesus made His triumphal entry into Jerusalem would a week later be crying out, “Crucify Him!”
In Acts 14, Paul healed a guy in Lystra who had been paralyzed from birth, and the people responded by calling him a god. Shortly thereafter, the people of Lystra stoned him.
Which all goes to say: Don’t trust your self-confidence to the poll data.
I love my friends, but they aren’t going to define me either. I am defined by who I am when I am alone with the God who loves me. He is my Abba. My Heavenly Daddy. When I feel like I need some more self-confidence I can always climb up into His lap and He gives me something better: Godfidence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson:
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.7
Retreating from the expectations of others doesn’t mean that you are going to end up living alone as a hermit or a crazy cat lady. In fact, it makes you less likely to end up alone. You become more attractive to people because you aren’t so clingy with them, not so dependent upon them, not always trying to get their attention. Instead, you can love them from the place of being comfortable with who you are. And that frees them to be more comfortable with who they are.
Everybody wins.
So, remember: People are not your dictionary. They don’t define you.
31
JELLYFISH
O death, where is your sting?
Well, it could be in the stinger of a jellyfish.
I remember when a bunch of us in my Squad were in the south of France, spending the night sleeping on the warm, white beach of the Mediterranean Sea. We woke up with our faces caked in sand to the sound of a bird making a whooping sound out at sea. When we looked more closely, that bird seemed to be standing on the water itself, as though it were contemplating the limits of physics and deciding it didn’t need to be hemmed in by them.
We brushed the sand off our clothes and ran down to the surf, where we plunged in and started doing backflips.
We were laughing hysterically when suddenly my buddy Sean stepped on a jellyfish and it stung him on the foot.
His response? He just started laughing uncontrollably.
“Sean,” I said, “that could be dangerous. You might die.”
“Well then, I might as well enjoy my last hour of life,” he returned.
Solomon was undoubtedly onto something when he said, “A merry heart does good like medicine.” Because Sean is alive and kicking—and still grinning at the abyss.
An Optimisfit isn’t afraid of dying. We just aren’t planning on doing it anytime soon. Until our number comes up, we are going to live at full throttle.
Sean knows the balance. He loves life. But he also has his head in the clouds.
Whenever a plane flies overhead, he brings his skateboard to a stop and turns his eyes to the sky. The sight gets him so excited that he dances a merry jig and his floppy hair goes flying. I gues
s that’s why he has decided to become a pilot. He has adopted the philosophy of Leonardo da Vinci: “When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”
The sting of death is softened when you know that there is something beyond it.
Someday Sean will move into his heavenly mansion.
But not yet.
There is still important laughing that needs to be done.
32
LAUGHING AT FEAR
Sean was all giggles when he got stung by a jellyfish. He thought it was funny.
Crazy, huh?
Honestly, that’s just the way he rolls. Whenever Sean gets stressed, he cracks up. In a situation where most people would throw a temper tantrum or freeze like a deer in the headlights, Sean just busts out in uncontrollable laughter.
Scientists tell us that laughing releases neuropeptides in the body, which strengthen the immune system. So my theory is that Sean literally laughed himself to health. It can be proven that depressed people get colds more frequently than the nondepressed, and that people who laugh more often live significantly longer. In fact, laughing a hundred times has the same effect on the body as working out on a rowing machine for ten minutes or on a stationary bike for fifteen.