Due to the way this present age is ordered, it is rare to find an honest optimist. When we think of someone who is optimistic, we conjure up someone in our imagination who is naive, delusional, or out-of-touch with reality. We all know this person. The one who has the incessant ceramic smile on their face, the one who speaks in motivating maxims and positive clichés, or perhaps the person who drowns their sorrows in positive thinking. This is not the genre of optimism that will save the world.
In a time when hurricanes, tsunamis, and floods threaten our lands. In a time when starvation, slavery, and the sex-trade industry is a reality. In a time when the daily news is filled with reports of scandal, murder, and rape. In a time when politicians, multi-national companies, and celebrities rule the world. In a time such as this, it is no wonder the lens by which so many of us choose to view objective reality through is one marked by pragmatism, narcissism, or pessimism.
There is another way of living between the extremes of an antiquated optimism and a bleak pessimism. I see this way best identified not in a philosophy, but in a person, my wife, Bridgette. She has first hand experience of how the world can hurt a person and family, but chooses to still view reality through the lens of, what I refer to as informed optimism. She knows more than many pessimists, the reality and damage of this current evil age, but chooses not to mask it in positiveness, but in a subversive hope. A hope that is sure and steadfast. A hope that anchors her soul. A hope that invites the very presence of God into her life so that the world may know a holy peace.
