by Ben Courson
The point is, God isn’t looking for us to be good little boys and girls. Jesus isn’t a tame lion, and we aren’t here to be tamed either.
So, we are ready to be released into something grand and meaningful and, well…fun.
We are the followers of Peter Pandemonium and we are here to rattle the cages, break the locks, and set people free to live as God meant them to. And that ain’t a vanilla religious mind-set. It is a call to adventure.
Who the Son sets free is free indeed.
That’s why we are raging against hopelessness and telling a new story.
Our story is about the ridiculously prodigal love of God, about beauty, about deep and lasting friendships, and about embracing each day with gleeful abandon and finding the magic and the mystery and the holiness in the ordinary. We are absurdly, uproariously, unapologetically optimistic about the dreams God has given us. He did not put them there to frustrate us, but to fulfill us!
Are we Optimisfits safe and predictable? No.
Are we dangerous? I certainly hope so.
People often think of rebellion as an angry and superserious thing.
Not me and my Squad.
We are total goofballs who understand that changing the world is not only something that should be fun, but that fun is, in fact, the very thing that sets the change in motion. A few minutes ago, I got off the phone with Cam and his brother, Sean. Our conversation essentially consisted of making gorilla noises to each other. These two are brilliant and successful filmmakers, but they know how important it is that work be seasoned with play. And childlike wonder.
That seems like God’s way too.
C’mon Peter Pandemonium, Neverland is waiting.
43
AS HUMBLE AS KANYE
Kanye West sends his thoughts into the world via Twitter:
“You may be talented, but you’re not Kanye West.”
“I wish I had a friend like me.”
“Maybe I couldn’t be skinny and tall, but I’ll settle for being the greatest artist of all time as a consolation.”
“I need a room full of mirrors so I can be surrounded by winners.”
Ummm. Yeah. No lack of confidence there.
People who are following God can often show a similar kind of unshakeable confidence.
Think of Moses. Numbers 12:3 tells us that Moses was the most humble man on earth. And you know who wrote that description? Yep. Moses himself, the author of Numbers. And since it is written in the third person it sounds even less convincingly humble. Let’s face it. Whether you are an athlete or a rapper or the deliverer of Israel, everything sounds cockier when you refer to yourself in the third person.
But, just to complicate matters, God told Moses to write that about himself. And who is going to disagree with God?
So, I’ll take my example from Moses.
I’m gonna say about myself what God says about me.
So, if God tells me that I am made in His likeness, then by golly, I’m not going to be unhappy about what stares back at me from the mirror.
We are His image bearers, crowned with honor and glory, and taking our place alongside the King as His chosen children.
And that is an immortal glory, because we are not just human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings that just happen to be having a human experience. Our glory is infinite.
To eternity and beyond!
We should be walking around like we have the cheat codes to win the game of life; like we are Super Mario and have been given the superstar power-up. Death has been undone, so we are claiming our spot in the victor’s circle. There is a throne awaiting. Just my size.
Come to think of it, Kanye’s boasts seem pretty tame compared to what I can boast as a child of God.
Kanye is confident, but we can be Godfident.
Not because of who we are, but because of whose we are.
We are invincible.
We have bulletproof souls. We can be killed, but we never die.
That, my friends, is what Optimisfits like to call hope.
I’ve given my life to spreading the message of hope. If hope were an Olympic event, I’d be a serious contender for the gold. It’s what drives me to climb aboard planes and travel around the globe with this good news about hope.
If you have the best message ever—and we do—then you gotta share it.
If you don’t feel a similar compulsion, then perhaps you haven’t really understood how big this hope is and the kind of dreams it releases.
You gotta dream a little bigger, darling. And you can, because our dreams are based upon a firm foundation of hope.
Psalm 20:4 says, “May He give you the desire of your heart.”
Psalm 145:19 promises that He will fulfill the desire of the one who fears Him.
And Psalm 37:4 tells us that God will give us the desires of our hearts if we delight in Him.
Yes, the biblical writers were not afraid of chasing and embracing their dreams. They knew that God wants to make our deepest dreams come true. And that He Himself is the key that turns the lock on the most wonderful of our dreams.
My long struggle with depression began to dissipate when I stopped apologizing for not being what others expected of me, and instead pursued with unbridled passion the call that God had put within me.
Perfect love casts out fear, and my fears of failure had to find the nearest exit.
So, get rid of fear. Show it the door.
Embrace hope.
Chase it. Track it down. Then bathe in it.
Do not proceed with caution.
Don’t die with your song unsung.
44
THE (ANTI) SUICIDE SQUAD
I get lots of texts and messages and emails from people who tell me that they really just want to die. Some of them are cutters. Some of them are overcome by guilt. Some of them feel like they have no value to anybody.
Like they are just goo on a cosmic shoe.
And when people feel like this, they don’t feel like they have the energy to go on.
I’m not going to tell you that life isn’t hard sometimes. But I am going to tell you that God has a special place in His heart for those who feel broken, to whom life has dealt a bad hand, or who are struggling just to keep their head above the water. He cares about the hurting heart.
Psalm 56 tells us that God collects all your tears in a bottle. That is how much your pain matters to Him.
In Old Testament times, women would often collect their tears and keep them in special tear bottles. Whether the tears were happy or sad, they were deemed too precious to be wasted. The tears spoke of a woman’s times of deepest sadness or her most extraordinary gladness, of uncontrolled giddy glee and the most heartrending grief. Then, when the day came, she would give this bottle of tears to the man she married. How terribly romantic.
Might want to keep that in mind for Valentine’s Day, huh?
I know of one great Bible scholar (who just happens to be, ahem, my dad) who suggests that in the story in the Gospels where the prostitute washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and then dried them with her hair, that she probably did this by emptying her tear bottle in an act of tender devotion. She was, in a sense, declaring herself a bride of Christ. Beautiful thought, isn’t it?
Tears are often more eloquent than words can ever be.
Tears can be the most powerful of prayers.
Your tears matter to God because you matter to God.
He knows the brokenness in your heart. None of your pain has gone unnoticed.
The Bible contains about 900 references to the heart, and when the heart speaks, it isn’t just referring to the tough little muscle that pumps your blood. It speaks of the sum and seat and center of who you are—the nexus of your emotional existence. And the idea of the broken heart? It can be traced all the way back to ancient Hebrew literature. In fact, the Bible invented the phrase “a broken heart”!
God wants to heal your broken heart.
; And at the same time He wants to use your brokenness to heal others.
The scars you share with others can become lighthouses to warn those headed toward the same rocks that nearly shipwrecked you.
The storms can’t take us to a place where God can’t keep us. Jesus slept right through a raging storm out on the sea while the waves buffeted the boat with their fierce turbulence. But when the disciples cried out in fear, Jesus awoke immediately. The wind and the waves could not wake Him, but the cry of human need could.
It still can.
A woman came up to me after a recent talk and shared that she had been seriously considering suicide, but that the words of hope I offered had made her rethink how much her life meant. She found hope in the words of hope I was sharing. Certainly not hope based upon me, but hope based upon God’s love and promises for her.
I just listened to her story while my eyes pooled with tears.
And here’s the thing. Even if you don’t feel like you can muster enough hope to go on—that isn’t a problem. Because we not only have God, we have each other. We can hold each other up through the tough times, and offer strength, encouragement, and caring when the path ahead seems too hard to travel.
I call my daily radio program “Hope Generation” because it is about a pun that offers both a personal and a collective appeal:
First, we are building a generation of hope globally.
Second, we can produce hope generation in each heart individually (generation can also mean creation). We create holy happiness and change this planet by dealing out hope galore.
In my struggles with depression over the years, it was always my friends who managed to help pull me out of the despair. I learned that I couldn’t go it alone, and that I was never meant to.
My friends didn’t help me by offering valuable therapeutic insights or some sort of complex intervention. They didn’t try to talk me out of my pain and depression. The way they healed my heartbreak was by grabbing a longboard and skating with me…without a single word about the grief I’d been through.
Their optimism, their fun, their craziness, their love…those are the things that put my broken heart back together again and reminded me that I mattered. That we all do.
Jean Paul Sartre famously believed that “hell is other people.”
That’s probably because he never had a chance to hang with the Optimisfits.
45
IMPOSSIBLE IS NOT IN MY DICTIONARY
“Impossible” is a word found only in the dictionary of fools. With God, nothing is impossible. No heartbreak is too large to be healed. No disappointment too deep to be overcome. No failure too horrible to be forgiven.
Impossible, to an Optimisfit, is more of a dare than a declaration.
We follow the God who is Lord of the Impossible.
So, don’t trust your eyes. Salt looks just like sugar. When your eyes deceive you, and tell you that God isn’t there or that He has forgotten you, don’t believe it for a minute. When it looks like your circumstances are most dire, is when you must remember that we walk by faith, not by sight.
Faithcast: One hundred percent chance of winning.
Just because the storm is present, doesn’t mean that our Savior is absent. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”
Optimisfits aren’t scared of death, so why should we fear anything on this side of death?
Worry is absurd. The famous mathematician Kurt Gödel worried himself sick. He was terrified of being poisoned, so he wouldn’t eat any food that had not been prepared by his wife. When she got sick and was hospitalized, he literally starved to death. Surely, he knew that his fear of being poisoned was less credible than the reality of starvation, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat. He starved to death at the age of 71.
Like Gödel, it is often our imagined fears that do more damage than anything based on reality. We are so worried about everything that the fear itself kills us in the end.
In his book The Artisan Soul, Erwin McManus writes:
Sometimes life comes with such blunt force trauma that the natural and human response is to curl up in a fetal position and hope that somehow the world will just go away. Yet incredibly we soon meet someone else who has suffered just as deeply and yet that person has somehow risen above their pain. They remember the pain but are no longer trapped in it. Occasionally we have the privilege of meeting that rare individual whose story is filled with such overwhelming tragedy that we wonder how in the world they can see so much beauty all around them. Yet those people do exist—people who have suffered more than you or me and yet remain more hopeful, more optimistic, and yes, even more joyful and happy.8
I was recently asked on a TV interview if I considered myself an introvert or an extrovert. I thought about it for a moment and said that such distinctions were too binary for my taste. So right there and then we came up with a new personality type that described me: the Godfident hopetrovert. Using that phrase may make your spell check go into spasms, but it seems exactly right to me.
If you’ve been an Optimisfit for any time at all you know that on your worst day with God you are better off than on your best day without God. Because when you’re going through your worst, God is busy planning His best.
There are plenty of people reminding us that we are all going to die soon. We need some people to remind us that we ain’t dead yet.
There are plenty of people who want to “tell it like it is.” But the world needs some more people who tell it like it can be.
There is no room in our dictionary for impossible.
46
THERE’S A LION IN TOWN
Solomon didn’t acquire gold as plentiful as stones by just sitting around.
He worked hard to achieve all he achieved, so in his book, “lazy” was a bad word. Throughout the pages of Proverbs, he mercilessly roasts lazy people. Over and over again, he talks about how laziness keeps us from living a good life.
My favorite example is Proverbs 26:13 when he quotes the lazy man as saying, “There is a lion in the streets.” That’s his reason for inaction. Now, think about it. A lion can run up to 35 miles per hour and jump 30 feet in a single bound. It is a scary beast, and one that would, without blinking, be happy to make a Manwich out of you. The lion is a frightening critter. But here’s the thing, you were never going to find a lion roaming in the streets of a Jewish town in Solomon’s day. And you certainly wouldn’t today.
A lazy person is someone who specializes in making excuses. And when they can’t find a legitimate one, an imaginary one will do.
Like that lion down on Third and Main.
The Book of Ecclesiastes warns that if you are always waiting for the perfect working conditions to arrive, you’ll never get anything done.
Jesus never had good working conditions. He was always beset by harsh critics, religious zealots, and curious onlookers who just wanted to see another miracle. And in the end, His most faithful followers proved less than dependable.
He was misunderstood, falsely accused, and then betrayed.
But through it all He kept to His mission. Because He knew that mission had come from God.
Jesus worked hard. Right before He died, He prayed, “I have finished the work You have given Me to do” (John 17:4 NKJV).
He was committed to the task He’d been given, and He gave His all. Literally gave His all. And the result was that He single-handedly built a kingdom.
Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “I know men, and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.”
Jesus was crucified with a sign above His cross that read: “King of the Jews.” This title was written in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew—a
nd there is a reason for that. Latin was the language of the Roman Empire: politics. Greek was the language of the great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle: philosophy. And Hebrew was the language of the Old Testament: religion. The Gospel writer was showing us that Jesus was the King of all three realms. This is just a gentle assertion of low-key world domination!
The best leaders are driven.
Napoleon built an empire that stretched from Spain to Poland because he was willing to work for it. He was single-minded in his focus. When he would attend the opera he usually looked bored, but it was really because he was busy plotting in his mind about how he could combine the three army corps at Frankfurt with the two in Cologne. He never shut off his brain and he kept it focused.