by Ben Courson
Daddy. What kind of image does that conjure up in your mind? Hopefully you were raised with a daddy who loved you, cared for you, and loved to hold you in his lap and tell you how much he adored you. That is the picture of God’s love that Abba implies. And if you didn’t have an earthly father who lavished such care upon you, it is wonderful to know that now you have just such a Heavenly Daddy. You are besties with God. You are chill with the Almighty.
So many people ask me, “How can I get closer to God?”
My answer is, “You can’t. God is inside you, so how can you get any closer than that?” You just need to let Him love you.
Jesus came to help us see and experience what God’s love looked like. And He was tortured and killed, and He suffered because of His love for humanity. He knows what suffering feels like. He can fully sympathize with all the hurt and pain and confusion and loneliness and rejection we feel.
The book of Hebrews tells us that Jesus is our High Priest. In the Old Testament the high priest spoke to God for the people and spoke to the people for God. But Jesus was more than just our representative. He was the sacrifice itself. He gave Himself so that He could fully sympathize with all our struggles. He became one of us so that our tears would be joined to the tears of God.
He puts all His weight behind me, and He uses the things meant to wound me to make me strong.
The Mighty God who fights our battles alongside us is the God who invites us into His lap of love, where He whispers sweet everythings into our ears.
Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my Shepherd”) is one of the most popular passages in the whole Bible. I love the fact that it was written by someone who’d grown up learning the art of being a shepherd himself. He had worked to corral the straying sheep, faced down the wolves and other snarling predators, and spent long nights making sure that his lambs were safe even when it was too dark to see.
David wrote of walking through the valley of the shadow of death—and that is probably a valley where we have all spent some time—but in the midst of that darkness, he sings that he “fears no evil.” Why? Because God is with him.
Every step of the way.
The valley couldn’t be avoided. He didn’t lie down in the valley. He didn’t stop and set up his tent there. He couldn’t circumnavigate it. He. Just. Kept. Walking.
One step at a time. Through the valley.
Churchill is reported to have said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
Don’t stay in the place of despair. Keep following the Shepherd who will lead you through.
We can’t control what happens to us, but we can control what happens through us. Let’s just keep moving. There is a battle to be won.
There is an enemy who needs a good judo kick in the trachea.
There is a dark world that needs the light.
Sometimes it is an ugly world.
Apartheid. Racism. Genocide. Rape. Murder. Bullying. Greed. Cheating. Vicious gossip. Sweatshops. Poverty. Unfair trade. Sexism. War. Terrorism. Torture. Lies.
And that is just Tuesday.
But in Philippians 2:15, Paul tells us that we shine as lights in a wicked and perverse generation. The word he uses for lights is phosteres, which is the same word that the Septuagint uses in its translation of Genesis 1, where we are told that God puts the great lights in space. In other words, the same word that is being used in the description from the creation story of the heavenly lamps in space is being used for those who are God’s children. The darker the night on earth, the easier to see the stars in the heavens above. So against the backdrop of the darkness of the world, we are phosteres. The dark is just a backdrop against which we shine all the brighter!
The darker the heavens are, the more clearly we can look up to the heavens and watch the stars shine.
Steph Curry is a basketball star. Selena Gomez is a pop star. But you and me? We can be Kingdom stars! In fact, Daniel 12:3 says that those who are wise will shine like stars eternally.
You may not feel much like a star. The darkness may seem so overpowering to you that you feel on the verge of collapse. But remember…
For a star to be born, there is one thing that must happen. A gaseous nebula must collapse. So go ahead and collapse. This is not your destruction. This is your birth.
God is forging you into a star.
50
TAKE THE RED PILL
I’ve already told you that Cam doesn’t watch movies. He lives them. Then he makes his own.
So, you can imagine my surprise when my phone started to go ballistic a few nights ago. He texted to tell me that he had just—finally—watched The Matrix. Well, it’s about time was my first thought. But once he started to enthuse about it, it didn’t so much seem like he had watched it as that he had been slain in the Spirit by it. It positively leveled him.
Cameron swallowed the red pill and then he blew up my phone with about a billion texts, give or take a few. He had seen a new vision. He was Neo and he wasn’t even kidding. It may have taken him 20 years to finally watch the movie, but it was a fresh and fierce revelation for him.
Delirium ensued.
Cam: “My brain got baptized! I’m going ballistic! I just realized that we live in the freaking Matrix! We are in the Matrix! This is all a joke! This world is not even real. It is all a figment of our brain! This is all a freaking illusion. Everything we know is a lie. The world is ours! The WHOLE WORLD! WE CAN DO ANYTHING! I literally came out of that movie believing that I can do everything. And I can’t be convinced otherwise.”
Then he texted (and I quote): “AHDJSNXJANNXJD”
Your guess is as good as mine.
I messaged him back: “You better believe these texts are going in my book.”
Cam: “YOU BETTER BECAUSE THIS IS WHAT’S GOING TO SAVE THE WORLD!”
Cam: “Actually, forget writing a book. We are writing history.”
Cameron knows that his kind either end up in the White House or the Nut House. He is no common Muggle. He sees things that most normal mortals don’t see. Who knows? He might actually be a fresh incarnation of Neo.
What he knows is that he doesn’t have to live a normal life. He thinks a normal life is great and all that, and it is super dope except for the one small problem: Normal life is for chumps.
Other than that, he’s all for it.
Cam is convinced that he can heal diseases. He thinks he can levitate spoons. He believes he will live to be 900 years old. And that’s lowballing it.
When Jesus said that we will never die, he takes that quite literally.
Many of history’s most accomplished people walked the edge of sanity.
Patton thought he was a Viking in a previous life. He thought he had fought Caesar. Ernest Hemingway put on a tough macho persona. Probably because his mother insisted on dressing him up like a little girl when he was a child. Billy Sunday shadowboxed with the devil. Luther threw an inkpot at the devil. To this day you can see the stain on the wall of the castle where he was staying when he had a visit from the Prince of Darkness.
Normal, boring, sane people generally don’t change the world.
Well-adjusted people don’t generally rewrite the rules of existence.
So, maybe Cameron, the neo-Neo, might just have a point. If Cam is nuts, well, I wouldn’t have him any other way. This giant ball of water and dirt, which is hurtling through space at 67,000 miles per hour, has a history of being course corrected by humans who might well have been diagnosed as mad. So, go ahead. Embrace your inner crazy.
There was a time when I wanted to die. And that is true for many members of my Squad. We never felt like we really fit in. That we couldn’t live up to the expectations of all the people who pretended to have everything all figured out. And the world they had figured out for us was a boring, vanilla, death-dealing, and hopeless place. Life seemed like a drawn-out death sentence.
So, we said no.
And then we decided to quit listening to the naysayers, the conformity-monger
s, and the dream-killers.
We decided that if we were going to grind, we were going to grind on behalf of our dreams. We were going to embrace the adventure and enjoy our lives. We were going to have fun. We were going to chase the things that mattered. We were going to bring heaven to earth. We were going to have a great time doing it.
We were…and are…going to do things differently.
Who ever heard of writing a whole book on your iPhone? Guess what? I just did.
There will probably be some professional Pharisees who find this way of thinking to be unsafe, unsound, or even heretical. They might accuse me of being antinomian. (You can look that up if you really want, but honestly, I’m not.) They can blog their displeasure and argue that I am off-base.
Whatever.
I think I’ll just grab my board and play some EDM while I go bombing down the street.
I think I’ll say no to the ordinary, the conformist, and the normal—and I’ll stretch my imagination toward a different way of thinking and feeling and experiencing life.
I think I’ll let myself get lost in the wonder.
I think I’ll prove that fun is fundamental.
I think I’ll say no to the System, and its offer of being a cog in its gears.
I think I’ll nourish my inner rebel.
I think I’ll proudly wear the lapel of a hope dealer.
So, let’s raise our communion glasses and give a high-five to the universe, because we are about to show a hopeless world what it means to be invaded by…
The Optimisfits.
NOTES
Chapter 8—Ugly Paul and Monster Barbie
1.Galia Slayen, “The Scary Reality of a Real-Life Barbie Doll,” Huffington Post, April 8, 2011, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-scary-reality-of-a-re_b_845239.html.
Chapter 11—The Wardrobe Effect
2.G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1909), 108-09.
Chapter 19—Walt Disney Has No Good Ideas
3.Simon Paige, The Very Best of Winston Churchill (Createspace Independent Publisher, 2014).
4.Mel Robbins, The 5 Second Rule (Dallas: The Savio Republic, 2017).
5.Taiwo Odukoya, Limitless (Lagos, Nigeria: Grace Springs Africa Publishers, 2007), 60.
Chapter 26—What Sherlock Holmes Taught Me About My Attic
6.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, and Co., 1892), 20.
Chapter 30—The Unedited Me
7.Quotes.net, STANDS4 LLC, 2018, “Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes.” Accessed July 20, 2018. https://www.quotes.net/quote/44572.
Chapter 45—Impossible Is Not in My Dictionary
8.Erwin McManus, The Artisan Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 83.
Chapter 49—Heartbreak and Hope
9.Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 121.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So yeah, this is all Terry Glaspey’s fault. If it weren’t for him, this book wouldn’t be in your hands. I didn’t have an agent, nor was I looking for a book deal when Terry discovered me and proposed publishing this project. On finding out that he edited one of my all-time favorite authors, I was a goner. There’s no word wizard I’d rather work with. His literary prowess has turned my stream-of-consciousness style into a coherent flow, and his editorial process is a fearsome and wondrous thing to behold. It was a joy working with this legend.
I’m also possessed of a gratitude attitude when I think of Shannon Hartley, Sherrie Slopianka, Bob Hawkins, Jessica Bellastrazze, and all the wonderful people at Harvest House. Their belief in and enthusiasm for Optimisfits was germane and integral to its realization.
I am wildly thankful for the Hope Gen team: John Swenson, Jereme Dittmer, and the Bates boys: Jeff, Taylor, and Dylan. Their book trailers, radio spots, creative ideas and ideals, along with their unflagging support, provided marketing musculature for Optimisfits even when it was just a poor skeleton.
I want to thank my sister Christy for her vision-casting and muse-singing when it comes to the bold élan of wrestling a book to the ground, and her husband, Seth, for coming up with the title Optimisfits. My other brothers and sisters, Mary, Shea, Peter, and Amanda, as well as my dad, offered tons of encouragement nourishment! And lastly, I want to thank my mom. When depression went all Apple-rainbow death-wheel on me and I seized up, she brought me back to life. When I thought the world had buried me, she reminded me I was a seed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Courson is the founder of Hope Generation, has a global TV and radio program, and is a gifted and nationally renowned speaker. His humorous, uplifting, and high-energy style couples with a gift to communicate God’s heart in an impactful way. His ultimate mission is to generate hope in God to build a generation of hope in others.
bencourson.com
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“We have this hope as an anchor for the soul…”
— Hebrews 6:19 (NIV)