Gritty Optimism

We have an inclination towards optimism. We are, after all, a people of immense hope. We, like Job, recognize God is sovereign even over our own suffering. We know that the difficulty we encounter in this life is not a measurement of who we are in God’s eyes (Ecc. 12). We hear Christ when he counsels us, “Do not worry about your life …” (Matt. 6). We know that Death has been defeated (Rom. 5). We are called to be people of power, love, and self control (2 Tim. 1), and we know who has real authority (Luke 10). Christians have immense reason for optimism.

But optimism is not always helpful. There is a kind of optimist who fails to deal with the reality of a situation. We could call this person the “naive optimist.” Naive optimists offer platitudes of hope or pithy sayings that remind us that God is in control — but they provide little that is more substantive than this. They fail to see the real situation that is connected to suffering, or they are at a total loss for what to do about those situations and consequently ignore or avoid them. In contrast, gritty optimism is the ability to repeatedly encounter difficult situations, seek improvement, be met with resistance, and refuse to give up hope. Gritty optimism is grounded in facing reality. These individuals are people of grit who require themselves (and others) to look at broken situations as they seek to impact the world for Christ — to bring about hope and redemption through their work.

I want to be a person of gritty optimism.

And I believe that the key to gritty optimism is joy. Joy is the critical element which enables a person to encounter difficulty and resistance without giving up hope. Words like joy are difficult to define (I love this about language — that there are some ideas which seem almost too big for the words we have for them). Dictionary definitions for joy seem inadequate. If I asked ten students to give me definitions, I would probably get twelve different ideas about how to define the word. I won’t attempt to define joy here — perhaps that is a task beyond the scope of what I can do in this blog entry. But I will attempt to ask a few questions. My hope is that you can find time this week to talk about these questions together with your family.

1. When was the last time you experienced joy? Who were you with? What were you doing? Was there any hard work involved? (italics added because that is an important question)
2. When was the last time you experienced a difficult situation and chose not to avoid it or ignore it?
3. Do you have any naive optimists in your life, and do their words or actions annoy you? What kinds of things do they say or do?
4. What is the most difficult thing in your life right now, and what hope do you have concerning that specific situation?

*It should be noted that many of the ideas expressed above are not my own original thoughts. My thinking has been deeply impacted by Jon Eckert, an endowed chair and professor of Educational Leadership at Baylor. He has a forthcoming book that is related to this topic — intended for parents and educators to read together — but this work has not yet been released. If you are interested in the topic of gritty optimism, you can listen to a podcast in which Dr. Eckert, Sierra Downs, and I explore it in more depth while talking about education at FRCS. You can find that podcast here.