Optimisfits Read online

He loves to take photos of people’s eyeballs, zooming in so close it looks like galaxies are melting in their irises. Everyone looks out from their eyeballs, but he looks into them.

  He is kind of a mad genius.

  And for all his artistry, he doesn’t take any of his art that seriously. There is a reckless devil-may-care touch to his work that makes it irresistible. That changes the way you see the world.

  Jesus said, “If you want to save your life, lose it.” Perhaps the same principle can be applied to art. If you want to make serious art, take it less seriously. And if you want to live a serious life, take yourself less seriously.

  The person who changed the world more than anyone else was a little bit like Brighton. Jesus was anointed with the oil of gladness above all His fellows. He was serious about His mission. He was serious about loving people. But He lived with a childlike, reckless wonder. No one loved life more than He did. He was the happiest person ever to live.

  Jesus enjoyed the joy of being enjoyed by God.

  “Just wait a minute,” the cynic will reply. “Jesus said following Him was carrying a cross—an instrument of torture. So, walking with God isn’t easy.”

  I reply that Jesus said His burden was light. He did all the heavy lifting on our behalf so that we don’t need to carry a burden. If your walk with God is burdensome rather than light, you’re doing it wrong.

  So, what did He mean when He talked about carrying a cross?

  Maybe a little history lesson would be helpful. When Jesus was about 11 years old, a misfit named Judas the Galilean raided the Roman armory just four miles from Jesus’ hometown. In a swift and merciless response, the Romans crucified two thousand of the rebels along the roadside. Jesus would have walked along that road and seen those poor rebels hanging on crosses. Surely that memory would have etched itself on His brain like psychic acid. Carrying a cross meant that you were submitting to the Roman government as they executed you. It meant you turned the other cheek rather than fight back.

  The Jews wanted to take up their swords against the Romans. Instead, Jesus told them to take up crosses. He told them to opt for peace rather than war. He said that instead of revenge, they should love their enemies.

  Carrying a cross has nothing to do with living a miserable life in which we believe that God is opposed to everything we enjoy. Carrying a cross is an anti-violence message. It isn’t about sacrificing your dreams or denying your pleasures.

  Remember. At His right hand “are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16: 11 ESV).

  Fun, my friends, is fundamental.

  7

  PROBING THE WOUNDS

  Many people succumb to the temptation of over-analyzing their own lives—of mentally rethinking all the mistakes and pains of the past. This tends to destroy an optimistic outlook faster than just about anything else.

  I don’t see much purpose in navel-gazing.

  In 1881 James Garfield was elected the twentieth president of the United States. Six months later, this Civil-War hero was shot in the back by an assassin. The doctors were able to save his life, but for all their efforts they were not able to locate the bullet. Though he was recovering just fine, in those days doctors believed that it was essential to remove the bullet so that it wouldn’t cause problems later. So they did more surgeries and probed all around, but still couldn’t find it. They even tried a new electrical invention from Alexander Graham Bell that they hoped would locate it. That didn’t prove successful either. Two months later President Garfield died—not from the original gunshot wound, but from the infection that came along with all the probing around.

  Moral of that story: Sometimes it is better to leave things alone. If you’re always probing around your hurts, your wounds, and your failures, you are never going to get well.

  Our tribulations are never fatal, but our pessimistic probing into them just might kill us in the end.

  8

  UGLY PAUL AND MONSTER BARBIE

  Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles, lived in beast mode. He traveled to far-flung places, unlike Jesus, who rarely traveled beyond His home country. Following the vision God gave him of the Macedonian man, Paul followed in the footsteps of Alexander the Great, but he was undertaking a conquest for the Kingdom of God.

  One area where Paul spent a great deal of time was Greece. The Greek culture wasn’t immediately ready to hear the message, what with their pantheon of gods and goddesses and assorted semidivine beings. And what the Greeks valued above almost everything else…was beauty.

  One of the reasons that Paul might not have been the most likely candidate for impacting the entire culture of Greece is that Paul was ugly.

  You’ll never dig up a Greek statue of an ugly person. Their sculptures idealized the human form. They made the gods look like ideal human beings and human beings look like gods. Masculinity in chiseled marble and femininity in perfect form. When the later Renaissance artists needed a guide to what the ideal human being should look like, they used the Greek models.

  So, when Paul brought his message to Corinth (in Greece), the Corinthians found him to be a disappointment. Sure, his sentences were beautifully crafted and his logic careful and precise, the kind of thing they admired. But though his words were weighty, they found his bodily presence less than impressive.

  We know that Paul was kind of ugly because of the description provided in a book called The Acts of Paul and Thecla, an apocryphal work that dates back to around AD 200. In it, the great apostle is described as “a man of little stature, thin-haired upon the head, crooked in the legs, of good state of body, with eyebrows meeting, and with nose somewhat hooked.” He was, in short, a bald, bandy-legged little dude with a unibrow that was not on fleek. A great orator and writer, sure, but he wasn’t going to win any beauty contests.

  I love the fact that it was an ugly guy who God used to spread the news of God’s Kingdom to Greece, a nation known for its obsession with beauty.

  Our American culture isn’t much different than the Greeks when it comes to how highly we esteem beauty. We are similarly obsessed. It is what we use to sell beer and cars and potato chips and gadgets for the kitchen. Someone who has been thoroughly air-brushed is the one who is pitching our products, implying that if we were to possess the said product that we would either be admired and desired by such a perfect form of human perfection, or that this purchase will somehow bring us closer to becoming such an individual ourselves.

  No worries if you aren’t beautiful. Our consumer culture has that covered. There are cosmetic products to cover every flaw. And if you can’t fool people in person, at least you can look your very best online. The internet is the perfect image-creating machine. Your picture can be photoshopped, airbrushed, and manipulated to make you a potential contestant in a beauty pageant.

  Just don’t let anyone see what you actually look like first thing in the morning.

  It seems to me that this pressure is especially hard on women. It has been estimated that the average girl has seen over 77,500 ads by the time she reaches 12 years old. And it just gets worse the older you get. The corporate profiteers know just how to play upon our normal insecurity about our looks in order to get us to reach for our credit card.

  At age 13, 53 percent of women are unhappy with their bodies, and by 17 that number spikes to 78 percent.

  The standard is an impossible one. Barbie.

  Problem is, nobody can actually reach that standard. Barbie’s body shape cannot be achieved by a real human being.

  Galia Slayen, a student at Hamilton College, once battled with body-image issues and an eating disorder. She realized that she had grown up thinking she should look like Barbie, so she decided to do an experiment. She created a life-sized model based on the toy doll. The results were disturbing. As she wrote on Huffington Post:

  If Barbie were an actual woman, she would be 5’9” tall, have a 39” bust, an 18” waist, 33” hips and a size 3 shoe…[She] would have a BMI of 16.24 and fit the weight criteria for ano
rexia.1

  Here’s the kicker: “She’d have to walk on all fours due to her proportions.”

  So, for all the little girls who say, “I want to look like Barbie when I grow up!”

  You sure about that?

  It is heartbreaking to think of how many girls—and guys—have bought into this lie. A lie that sells products but doesn’t bring happiness. A standard that is impossible and unrealistic. Let’s dethrone the various Barbies of our culture. Let’s remember that God chose an ugly dude to write much of the New Testament and to travel around the known world sharing good news about what really matters…

  What’s important is not how we look on the outside, but who we are on the inside.

  Remember God’s perspective. You are valuable. You are beautiful. Just as you are.

  Stop listening to the lies.

  My friend Cambria says that we aren’t here to perfect our image so much as to reflect God’s image. As someone made in the image of God you don’t receive your value from the whims of advertisers. Your beauty comes from the fact that you have been created to reflect the very image of God.

  God commanded people not to make graven images because He had already made images of Himself: you and me. Consequently, we see a guy walking a dog and say, “Oh, how cute! A puppy!” But God sees a guy walking a dog and responds, “Oh, how cute! A human!”

  We are Imago Dei. The very image of God.

  Image—God’s image—is everything.

  God sees you as a knockout, drop-dead beauty…just as you are.

  He thinks you are “to die for.”

  And He did.

  9

  HOPE IS DOPE

  You have probably figured out from all the quotes throughout this book that I love reading.

  Reading has changed my life. While some people got their education by spending $60,000 for four years of college, I got most of mine through signing up for a library card. Nothing wrong with college, but you can spend a lot of money on education and still not be all that smart. But readers are leaders. And neuroscientists have discovered that reading is one of the best things for developing your brain.

  If you become a reader it will open up your world, challenge your thinking, and equip you to be even more of an Optimisfit than you already are.

  One book that I’ve found to be a particularly fascinating read is, you guessed it, the Bible.

  Now, religion has done a lot of damage to the way people look at the Bible. The religious folks have turned it into a comprehensive rule book or into some sort of weird Ouija board that dispenses magic nuggets of wisdom. No wonder a lot of people have decided they just aren’t interested.

  No surprise there.

  Religious people have a habit of twisting every good thing from God into something stale and boring and guilt-inducing. The Bible is no exception.

  But honestly, I wonder if the religious people are actually reading the Bible. Because if they really were, they would be finding that it is not a list of regulations or a Magic 8 Ball. It is chock-full of and jam-packed with the promises of God. And since the living God is a God of hope, that means that His book is centered on hope. It is bubbling over with a frothy joy based upon that hope.

  The Bible contains 1,189 chapters. Not every one of them is centered on the topic of hope, but that is the big overriding theme of the Good Book. The Bible contains 66 books, written by 40 different authors. Fourteen of them were written by the Apostle Paul. And in one of those is one of my very favorite verses. A verse that defines the whole Bible: “Everything that was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope” (Romans 15:4).

  There it is. Bam.

  The central theme.

  The Bible was given to us so that we might have hope.

  Therefore, and this is really important, if you read the Bible and walk away with less hope rather than more hope, it’s a giant exercise in missing the point.

  Please read that last sentence again.

  We suppose the Bible in our lap to be a book. But it is actually a library. There are many books inside. Most of the Bible is a story, but then there’s a ton of poetry in there too. What’s more, there’s a memoir or two or three, legal code, genealogy, and loads of wisdom one-liners (an early form of Twitter?). There’s even a play in the Bible. Of course, there are quite a few letters, a number of biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, a theological essay or two, not to mention a genre of literature we don’t even have any more called apocalyptic. This library in your lap was penned over a period of a thousand years. It is the bestselling book of all time. It unflinchingly talks about the human condition: love, hate, war, injustice, when the church gets cozy with the empire, traumatic pain and healing, the meaning of existence, what to do with mold in your kitchen (don’t forget that!), romance, the end of the world, doubt… you name it, it’s all there.

  Now, watch this…

  About 43 percent of the Bible is narrative or story. And 33 percent is poetry. So, that means about 80 percent of the Bible is either a story or a poem, and less than 20 percent of Scripture is made up of straightforward teaching. If you consider how much of the Bible is made up of direct commands, well, now we are down into the single digits.

  That should change our whole approach to this book. It is not a legal document as much as a story and a poem. It’s not intended to help us learn how to play by the rules. It is something much bigger than that. It is the beautiful story of how God sacrificed everything for you, His pearl of great price.

  But since religious people like laws, many read the New Testament and try to turn it into a New Law. A new version of the old set of laws and commandments. They try to make Paul into Moses 2.0 and put all the focus on the dos and don’ts in his writings. And they miss the main message of “sonship,” and freedom and hope.

  We aren’t set free so that we can be given a new set of shiny, fresh regulations for living.

  We are set free to live. With God, and for God, and for one another.

  God is not a theology. He is a person.

  And His book is not a systematic theology.

  It is the unsystematic story of how crazy He is about you and me.

  It is as wild and untamed as God Himself.

  And with all the war and murder and sex, it isn’t rated G. But it’s a mighty good read.

  10

  CAMBRIA’S JOY

  Some people just fit their name.

  Cambria Joy is one of them. She simply sparkles. Her ear-splitting grin just lights up everything around her. I’m so grateful to be her friend. She’s a key member of my Squad.

  And she is kinda famous.

  But that’s no big deal with her. One day when she was still in her teens, Cambria sat down in front of her computer and created a simple little video blog about pretty ordinary stuff. It went viral. The thing is, she can talk about split ends or baby hairs or zucchini and it is all just plain fascinating.

  She has become something of an internet star. Her blogs and videos get millions of hits, and she has her own following of fangirls, looking to her for advice on health, and happiness, and faith. Hanging on every word.

  I’m a fan too. She and her husband, Bo, are two of my closest friends.

  She has become my official little sister.

  One of the things Cambria likes to talk about is body image. About how we are all held hostage to a bunch of unrealistic standards and goals about how we should look. It’s a bondage that has trapped a lot of my generation. Advertising, movies, television, music—they all deliver a message that we aren’t quite good enough to make the cut. That if we do this or buy that we’ll be transformed into the perfect image that our culture is trying to sell us.

  Somebody’s getting rich by making us feel terrible about ourselves.

  Cambria reminds us that the goal of our lives shouldn’t be about perfecting our body image, but about reflecting God’s image.

&n
bsp; Not by makeup, clothes, plastic surgery, or working to be as cool as possible.

  Cambria is cool because she is just the person that she is.

  She’s got more charisma than DeNiro in Godfather Part II. And like him, she is larger than life.

  Cambria is beautiful because she is lit up from the inside. God shines through her like almost no one else I know.

  And Cambria is profound because she doesn’t take herself too seriously. She loves a midnight trip to the local playground and enjoys playing on the slides meant for a five-year-old. She’ll scream mock terror at the top of her lungs as she goes sliding down and collapse in a giggling heap at the bottom.

  Five-year-olds don’t give a lot of thought to fitting in with expectations or worry all that much about conforming. They just live at full-tilt, savoring every moment, and having the time of their lives.

  That’s what I like about five-year-olds.

  That’s what I like about Cambria.

  11

  THE WARDROBE EFFECT

  If you are really paying attention you’ll find that life is…magical.

  When you step out the front door first thing in the morning ready to face the new day, you immediately are presented with the necessity of deciding what kind of world you are wandering into.