Optimisfits Read online

  No, life is messy and wild.

  And so are the Optimisfits.

  In this book I am going to introduce you to the Squad—the people who share this Optimisfit life with me. We are all living life together as rebels against hopelessness.

  We stand against the false narratives of cynicism and nihilism.

  We stand against the kind of Christianity that makes life all about being careful, boring, safe, and conformist.

  We love God, but we want to live in a different kind of way.

  We want to rebel against both the culture of hopelessness…and against the culture of vanilla-flavored Churchianity.

  That’s how we roll…

  4

  THE OPTIMISFITS

  So, who are the Optimisfits?

  We Optimisfits embrace an adventurous lifestyle. We go on adventures with our Squad…and adventures with God. We aren’t interested in working 40 hours a week for 40 years to retire on 40 percent of our income. There’s nothing wrong with hard work, but you have to make room in your life for a little crazy adventure or two. We love to explore this magical planet God made. We hike the Matterhorn, we go four-wheeling in abandoned water parks, we explore the hidden waterfalls of Oahu, and we do handstands at the Eiffel Tower.

  We embrace an adventurous life of the mind. We skateboard and we read Kierkegaard. We aren’t afraid to explore the dark places of human existence with Kurt Vonnegut and Sylvia Plath. We read fantasy novels and remind ourselves that we already live in Narnia.

  We live by nobody else’s rules.

  When someone tells us something is impossible, we see it as a dare rather than a declaration. If it is impossible, we do it anyway. If William Pitt the Younger could become the Prime Minister of England at age 24, then what holds us back from tackling anything in our path?

  After all, we’re too young to realize that certain things are impossible.

  So we will do them anyway.

  Rather than seeing the glass as either half-full or half-empty, we just see the glass as totally full. We say with David, “My cup…runneth over.”

  (Miscellaneous random scientific insight: Technically the glass is totally full; one half is full of hydrogen and oxygen, and the other half is full of nitrogen and oxygen. David was onto something, eh?)

  We don’t wink at suffering. We don’t act like pain isn’t real. We just choose to face it and conquer it. We have nightmares. We have dreams. We can conquer our nightmares because of our dreams.

  We are all about hope. We hate clichés about Christian joyfulness heard many a Sunday morning that frankly don’t work. But neither are we timid about expressing how recklessly hopeful we are choosing to be. We share the certainty of Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” That’s a motto we can believe in.

  We are antiestablishment. Rebels. Dreamers. We choose to live like Jesus. Like Him, if we are going to offend anyone it will be the religious people. We love them but we aren’t going to cater to them. We aren’t vanilla. We are extreme.

  We are all about having fun. We believe that fun is what will change the world. And we want to change the world. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, once said, “The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do it.” Yeah, we are a little crazy. Okay, maybe a lotta crazy. But it is misfits like us who can show people a different way to live.

  Why am I an Optimisfit?

  I am fully confident that in the big book of my own story, when the last line is finally written, it will cast light backward into the darkest corners of the earlier chapters of my life. I don’t have to understand everything now. But I’m not pretending that the darkness isn’t real and that sometimes life isn’t hard. The philosophy of the Optimisfit allows me to remain fantastically hopeful in the face of whatever life throws my way. It understands that such hope can be an act of fierce rebellion against the hopelessness of the world.

  This isn’t a journey I travel alone. My Squad is made up of a bunch of hope dealers, and there’s no place like hope. They’ve given me a place of belonging.

  I didn’t always live so boldly. I wasn’t always so wild. I wasn’t always so enthusiastic about life. I used to feel like an outcast. I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere. I was without much purpose. I wandered alone.

  And then I wandered into the arms of my fellow Optimisfits.

  I hope you’ll join me there…

  5

  GOD AND MY SQUAD

  I used to be a loner.

  For much of my life, particularly during my twenties, I didn’t have a lot of friends. I told myself that I was just too busy to hang out. I was defined by the grind. I would hustle and sweat and work long hours. And I was miserable. But it took me a while to catch on to that fact.

  I became my own best company. As long as I was burning the midnight oil I thought I was happy. Work meant more to me than friendships. My best buddies were those who’d written the books I loved—people like C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, and George MacDonald. Problem was, they were all dead.

  Frankly, this made for a rather one-sided conversation.

  Then I discovered the power of Squad. The old-fashioned word is community, but I found myself surrounded by a group of people who didn’t just commune—they dived into life with all the purpose of a sports team intent on winning.

  It happened because God brought actual living human beings into my life. They pulled me out of my own head. They gave me something to think about beyond the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I…and the boring life the three of us led together. It was like going from womb to world, or caterpillar to butterfly. It was like messing about with Minions before taking flight on the Millennium Falcon. I took the jump from solitude to solidarity. With my Squad at my side I could live a better life. I went from loneliness to the joy of real friendship.

  It is better to infiltrate than to isolate. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

  The way not to give up is to Squad up.

  My friends and I are living a different kind of life with God. We are embracing a different kind of optimism. Not just wishful thinking, not just positive thinking, but transcendent thinking. We aim to transcend both the churchy optimism that is out in the weeds, as well as the atheistic pessimism that leaves everyone in the dumps, by acting with a fearless hopefulness. We refuse to let the world just happen to us. We happen to the world.

  We are ridiculously hopeful and unapologetically rebellious. And we are in this adventure together.

  Too many people die with their song still inside them. Too many people die in their twenties and are buried in their seventies. Too many people exist, but don’t actually live. They breathe and perspire, but they are acting like not much more than a bag of bones and a carbon footprint. They are alone. And they despair.

  Our generation tries to deal with this loneliness by popping pills to keep us cheerful, checking our iPhone every 20 seconds to see if we still matter, by trying to build our virtual kingdom in World of Warcraft 25, and by watching way too much television. Stephen King once said that it is not the great tragedies of life that make one suicidal, but that sometimes one just gets tired of watching afternoon television.

  Here in America we consume more pills to ease our depression and anxiety (by three times) than the rest of world combined. Antidepressants are some of the fastest-selling prescribed medications in the United States. Suicide is one of the top-ten causes of death here in the land of broken hearts. We are a nation built on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but we are stressed, distressed, depressed, and in deep debt.

  Earlier in this book I referred to my depression. It’s been said that the scars you share become lighthouses for others. Maybe I can help you avoid some of the rocks that nearly shipwrecked me.

  Depression is awful.

  During my own long fight with despair I hated waking up in the morning to f
ace another day. I was like Finnick in Mockingjay. I would drag myself out of nightmares every morning to find no relief in waking. My future stretched out before me as an infinite grayness, with nothing to look forward to that I could actually take any joy in. I knew God was walking alongside me in my shadowy valley, but somehow that didn’t stop me from despairing of life whenever dawn rolled around.

  To make things worse, I was a pastor.

  As a pastor you are supposed to have your act together. You are supposed to be able to inspire others, but I couldn’t even inspire myself. You are supposed to have the answers, but all I had was a growing list of questions. I was just so tired that all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep.

  Here I was, the 18-year-old wunderkind. I was good at what I did. People said that they found my sermons wiser than my age would allow for. I was telling people how to find peace and joy with God, but inside I felt empty. The harder I tried, the more depressed I became.

  I tried to act like the good churchy pastor, but I was really more interested in watching Star Wars again (for the eighty-seventh time) or shooting hoops than in hanging around people who were expecting me to be the somber, serious saint everyone expected me to be.

  I started to quote from Ecclesiastes a lot in my talks. My life verse became, “Meaningless, meaningless. Everything is meaningless.” I agreed with Herman Melville that Ecclesiastes was the truest book in the Bible. It summed up how I felt pretty neatly. And even on those mornings when I kept busy and felt a little more okay, I knew that by midafternoon the poisonous bank of mental fog would come rolling in.

  And I thought about death. A lot.

  Since many of the greatest people in history had struggled with this same battle that I was facing, I found a little bit of ironic encouragement in that. After all, the great prophet Elijah was almost suicidal in his despair. Job cursed the day he was born. Abraham Lincoln sometimes walked alone in the woods with a shotgun cradled in his arms, tempted to kill himself. Winston Churchill had to insist on a flat on the lower floor lest he decide on a whim to fling himself off the balcony. And Charles Spurgeon, the “Prince of Preachers,” would descend into crippling depression every Sunday night after spitting out golden words that very morning.

  If the great thinkers found life gloomy, who was I to argue?

  My mind was as full of scorpions as Macbeth.

  But then everything changed.

  You might think I am going to tell you about some life-changing ecstatic religious experience, or how God appeared to me in bodily form to tell me everything was going to be okay, or that I won the lottery and now all my dreams could come true.

  Nope.

  It was nothing like that.

  Instead, a Squad of Optimisfits invited me out of my loneliness and called me to quit all the existential navel-gazing.

  Every person has a different story, and I’m not saying that everyone’s depression will be lifted in the same way that mine was. Nor am I saying that it was a magical, overnight transformation. But I am saying that I had to get outside of my own head and start embracing my need for people in my life. Friends. A Squad of fellow travelers. Not just God, but people. I couldn’t do life by myself, and when I realized that fact, things began to change.

  These people taught me that I needed to stop being vanilla and boring and predictable. They told me to stop apologizing that I couldn’t live up to other people’s expectations for me. They showed me how to dance in defiance of the dark.

  They taught me how to have fun.

  Alone, life was a philosophical problem. With them, life was an adventure.

  We decided that life was a splendid thing, and that we could suck all the marrow out of life, just like Thoreau said. We could put to rout all that was not life. A life of quiet desperation? Well, that was for chumps.

  Instead we wanted to walk with the living God here in the land of the living. Walking with God is fun. He’s the One who put the fun back in funeral. God and the Squad—that was the secret we’d found to happiness and meaning. We wanted to change the world, and we realized that changing the world would be the best kind of fun. And fun was the best way to change the world.

  We’d skateboard and excitedly discuss the finer points of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. We’d live crazy to show the world that hopelessness is not the only option for how to live. We’d be the alarm clock to awaken the soul of a country that has put its hopes to bed.

  Now that I have invited friends into my life, I can see so much more clearly. When C.S. Lewis was alone and bereaved after the death of his wife, he wisely wrote, “You can’t see anything properly when your eyes are blurred with tears.” So true. My Squad helped me see clearly again. They showed me that God doesn’t want my life to be miserable. He wants my life to be memorable. We may sow in tears today, but we will reap in joy tomorrow.

  If you are trying to go it alone, let me encourage you to find your own Squad. It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes some risking, a lot of vulnerability, and putting your fear of being known aside. But you can find a better life when you pursue life with others.

  Open up.

  Squad up.

  And embark on the friendventure.

  6

  FROTHY AND SCHLUMPED

  Brighton is one of the members of my Squad.

  You’d like him. Everybody does.

  To be honest, he’s just a tiny bit this side of crazy. He’s been known to sneak into the offices of Palm Springs executives and decorate his arms with the little ink stamps they use for marking documents. These temporary tattoos are his way of showing that he isn’t going to be brainwashed into conformity like Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984. He’s his own sort of marked man, using office supplies to announce his rebellion against the ordinary and expected.

  Brighton has a feverish and single-minded dedication to having fun. There isn’t anyone else like him in the known universe…and I suspect in the unknown universe as well. He’s a Californian who dresses like some sort of dancer or white rapper. He pretty much dances everywhere he goes. Everything is background music for his life. It has been said that children have yet to learn that there is anything that isn’t music. That’s how it is for Brighton. There is always music in his head.

  A lot of that music is EDM. Just in case you don’t know, and to save you having to use your dictionary app, EDM is Electronic Dance Music. A couple of weeks ago he took me to an EDM concert. Brighton danced like a wild man. We lost ourselves for a while in the throb and hum of the music and the dazzling light show. The stage lights cast an icy blue over everything. The brilliant colors were the neon of my childhood and the white was like moonlight on snow. I was filled with ecstasy and wonder and my soul fell open to the effects of the sights and sounds.

  The concert baptized my imagination, just like the book Phantastes did for C.S. Lewis.

  Brighton reminds me that there is much more mystery to this world than I often notice.

  Part of his skill set is what he can do on a skateboard. It makes your jaw drop. Dude. How does he do that? And he is smart, the recipient of a perfect 4.0 grade point average.

  Brighton might be best described as frothy, which is one of his favorite words. That and schlumped.

  Brighton has two speeds: dead stop and 97 miles per hour. He is either lazy as a sloth or he is bouncing on a trampoline, his veins bulging as he performs four backflips in a row while screaming something that sounds like “boiiiii.”

  In that crazy frothy head of his, Brighton hears the Muses sing.

  When Brighton starts to wax lyrical, he talks about stuff like “the eye of the scorpion.” I have no idea what that means. And you never know when he will lapse into gibberish, a language of his own creation that is about as intelligible as Klingon. For no particular reason he likes to call me Daryl.

  His 4.0 notwithstanding, he talks like a stoner. As though all the dendrites in his brain are fried.

  But his mental state has nothing to do with drugs. It is the r
esult of being someone who just embraces all the joy of life with a childlike wonder. This is probably what makes him a great photographer—in fact, one of the most admired photographers in the known universe, and probably in the unknown universe as well. He is someone who lives with his eyes wide open, taking it all in, and then transforming ordinary things into something beautiful.

  He loves to listen to electronic music artist Illenium as he works on his photos. He describes the music as being that of angels pouring honey down his ear. He edits turquoise and flame hues into his photos. The result is unbelievable. His twilight pictures capture the fire and garnet of the sunset, as if the night is on the edge of becoming and the day has not quite run out of things to say to itself. He makes clouds look like flamingo feathers and stars like exploding fireworks falling through the everlasting. They are like sapphires set against the inky dark of interstellar velvet. When he captures the night sky in his lens it looks like every twinkling star is God walking over one of the leaks in heaven’s floorboards.