Optimisfits Read online

  A recent study reported that no matter who you are, 25 percent of the people you meet won’t like you. No. Matter. What. Another 25 percent won’t like you at first, but might be won over. Another 25 percent like you, but could be persuaded to change their mind. And the last 25 percent are your fan base. They always love you, but keep in mind that this includes your mom, and well, she has to like you. It’s actually kind of freeing to think about this. No matter what you do, you are not going to get everyone to like you. And even the nicest blokes will have their detractors. So, what do you do? You just take the criticism in stride.

  And the harder you work to change the world, the more enemies and naysayers you are likely to gather. Because most people don’t want new ideas. They don’t want to change or be challenged, thank you very much.

  Don’t make me feel guilty. Don’t make me feel uncomfortable. Don’t challenge my ideas or ask me to look at things differently. Just let me stay comfortable believing what I want to believe.

  That is the chorus of those who don’t want to hear what you have to say and set themselves up as your enemies. They are stubborn.

  So, we should be stubborn right back. We should love them stubbornly.

  They can’t keep us from loving them.

  Our haters are our motivators.

  And since when did tigers lose sleep over the opinions of sheep anyway?

  An entire ocean of water can’t sink a ship, unless it gets inside the ship.

  All the negativity and criticism can’t take us down unless we let it get inside us. No jerk can make me do anything or get a reaction out of me unless I give him permission to get inside my head.

  Instead of letting that happen, we can decide to throw love around like confetti.

  The same Jesus who was criticized, cursed, spat upon, and nailed to a cross…and who knew this would be His fate told them to love their enemies, to pray for those who use you or curse you or hate you. And when it comes to cheeks, it is always good to turn them.

  When the moment came, Jesus practiced the very things He had preached. He loved the very people who had come to execute Him.

  Jesus did not come to destroy. He came to save. He chose redemption over destruction.

  When the Romans came to arrest Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, He was already sweating drops of blood as He prayed. This was the first time He bled for us. Paul tells us that Jesus is the last Adam. The first Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden and sentenced to work by the sweat of his brow. Now, the last Adam was back in a garden, bleeding by the sweat of His brow to redeem man’s work. It was, you might say, a curse reverse.

  There, in the garden—at the crossroads—Jesus chose the road to the cross.

  It was the pivotal moment in Jesus’ life. He had taught others to love their enemies and pray for those who persecuted them. To bless those who cursed them. To do good to those who hated them. To turn the other cheek. And now, the question was: would He abide by His own teachings? Would He love the very ones who came to execute Him?

  Sure enough, Jesus didn’t call on a squadron of angels to rescue Him or do battle against His enemies. In fact, when Peter drew his sword to protect Jesus, he was given a stern rebuke.

  Jesus accepted the task at hand, He gave Himself freely into the hands of His adversaries, and He walked the lonely road to His crucifixion, even as His friends fled or denied Him.

  He went the extra mile for us. And one thing you can say about the path of the extra mile is that it is never crowded.

  There is something very interesting to be gleaned from Jesus’ words about turning the other cheek. He said that if someone slaps you on the right cheek, then turn and offer him the left one. Let’s think about this for a minute. Most people are right-handed. So, how do you strike a person on his right cheek with your right hand? Well, unless you are some sort of contortionist it means that you slap him with the back of your hand. And in Jewish culture a backhand was considered twice as insulting as being hit with the flat of your hand. You would only backhand someone of a lower caste in the Jewish hierarchy, such as your slave or servant. To hit someone with the flat of your hand, however, was to admit them as an equal (albeit as an equal that had ticked you off royally).

  So, Jesus is saying that if someone backhands you, turn the other cheek so that enemy has to strike you as an equal. Turning the other cheek then, is no sign of weakness. It is a symbol of putting yourself and your enemy on the same footing. It is a choice that takes away the power of the oppressor.

  Or if someone asks for your tunic, will you be like St. Francis of Assisi and give away every stitch of clothing, putting aside all your dignity, and stand naked before your enemy? Francis did that literally, as he renounced all his father’s riches and re-clothed himself in the simplest of garments. When you see someone naked it makes everyone feel overdressed.

  Or, if someone demands you to go one mile, then go the extra one. Since Israel was an occupied territory during the time of Jesus, it gives extra power to this saying. According to Roman law, a Roman could tap a Jew on the shoulder with the flat of his spear and demand that he carry his luggage for him for a mile, just like a beast of burden. But it was against the law for a soldier to demand that he carry it two miles. If he carried it an extra mile, that was technically breaking the law. This is a good reminder that we have the choice as to how we respond to those who wrong us. The extra mile is our choice. It is saying yes to a different way of relating to the one who is making unreasonable demands upon us.

  Our choices can disempower the enemy.

  Gandhi called it soul-power. When he led the Indian people under British rule in a peaceful protest centered on not fighting back, it led the British to relent. They eventually had to sail away from India because Gandhi wouldn’t fight back. When Martin Luther King Jr. followed Gandhi’s example of nonviolent civil disobedience he could begin the long job of overturning racial injustice in the United States. It didn’t come without a price, without some pain and suffering and sacrifice, but change was initiated when the choice was made to turn the other cheek.

  Turning the other cheek isn’t the sign of being a doormat. It is a sign of strength.

  It says that you will not sink to the level of the enemy by engaging in revenge or payback.

  Frankly, it annoys our enemies when we don’t retaliate with an “eye for an eye” response, because it puts us on the moral high ground.

  It annoys our enemies when we won’t fight back, because it is intimidating when someone won’t play by the usual rules of revenge.

  It annoys our enemies when we won’t be the aggressor, because it demonstrates that the only kind of aggression with ultimate power is aggressive love.

  Jesus’ love for His enemies was so intimidating that it made them rethink their actions and change their minds, like the Roman soldier who looked on at the crucifixion and figured out what it all meant.

  We can be loving, because we have let God love us. We can give out love, because He has given us His love. We can’t dispense love if we are drawing from an empty tank. It starts by filling up with His love. As John the Apostle writes in one of his letters, “This is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us” (1 John 4:10).

  The world tells us that when we are wronged we should fight back.

  But then again, since when did Optimisfits ever obey what we are told we should do? Our act of rebellion is stubborn love.

  24

  ON GOD’S BEAT

  I’ve long been a fan of the Beat Poets, those freewheeling writers who traveled around the United States in the ’50s and wrote fiery, passionate prose about what they thought and experienced. I remember being blown away by reading On the Road, the story of the crazy, chaotic, poetic journeys of Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and their compatriots. I wasn’t exactly stoked about their experiments with drugs and free sex, but I loved their passionate rebellion against conformity. They weren’t interested in fitting in, playing it safe, or chasing our culture�
�s idea of the successful life. Instead, they just wanted to live with maximum passion.

  Kerouac writes about his own Squad, and says that they “never yawn or say a commonplace thing.” Rather, they “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

  He recorded the whole book on a roll of butcher paper, scribbling away while Cassady took the wheel, careening across the wide landscape of America in search of a different way to approach life. His poetic jottings inspire me to think about finding a better way to walk the Jesus path.

  My own Squad of Optimisfits has taken them on as a sort of model for our lives. In many ways, I like to think our way of living is an answer to what was best in the Beat Poets.

  They dropped acid. We are high on life.

  They listened to jazz. We frequent EDM raves.

  They read Dostoyevsky. We can’t get enough of George MacDonald.

  They lived “on the road.” We save our money and head to Iceland. Just because we can.

  They proved they were modern cowboys by breaking the rules of grammar, such as putting periods in. random. places. We break the rules of conformity. Period.

  Breaking rules is where you find life.

  Jesus was the greatest rule breaker of all time. The God-in-the-flesh, beat-poet-of-existence, rebel-lover rule breaker. He broke rules all the time. He never seemed to worry too much about what the pious Pharisees were expecting of Him. He stood up to them and called them on the way they had made life about rules rather than a wild adventure with God.

  The religious people of His day were more worried about breaking the letter of the Law than they were about people. Since the Law of Moses said that you couldn’t bear a burden on the Sabbath, they started dissecting exactly what that might mean. They actually debated whether a father could lift his child on the Sabbath, if a woman could wear a wig, if the elderly could wear their dentures, or if a maimed person could strap on their wooden limb. After all, each of these might technically be considered “burdens” that were being carried. And if you were a doctor you would be breaking the Sabbath to treat a patient unless the disease was life threatening.

  Talk about straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.

  So, what does Jesus do as He wanders about Israel preaching and teaching? He heals people on the Sabbath. In the Gospels He does this seven times. This is against the Law of the Sabbath. Does He care about the Sabbath? Yes, but not as much as He cares about people.

  I want to be like Jesus when I grow up.

  Which is to say, I want to be rebellious against all the rules and conformity.

  The older generation tells us to grow up.

  We just say, “No thanks.” We aren’t that interested in making them feel comfortable. We are interested in making a difference. We aren’t dope dealers. We are hope dealers.

  Researchers tell us the average child laughs 200 to 400 times a day. The average adult, on the other hand, laughs between thirteen to seventeen times a day. What?!

  I think if you aren’t laughing a lot, you really aren’t paying attention.

  Seriously.

  25

  A VERY PROFOUND STATEMENT

  If you want to be number one, you have to be odd.

  Just sayin’…

  26

  WHAT SHERLOCK HOLMES TAUGHT ME ABOUT MY ATTIC

  Some people just make life so difficult.

  Not long ago I had someone pull me aside to let me know he had a burden on his heart that he wanted to share with me. I readied myself to hear what heavy truth he was feeling compelled to share. His heavy truth was that he thought I spent too much time skateboarding.

  Seriously?

  Such people don’t keep their unhappiness to themselves. They seem set on making everyone else’s life difficult too. In the words of John Green, they maintain their lovely figures by eating nothing but the souls of kittens and the dreams of impoverished children.

  These curmudgeons come in two varieties: the secular variety and the religious variety. But in either case they are the stone-faced mortal enemies of those of us who think life should be fun. They are sour-faced atheists who want to drain every drop of mystery out of the world. They are bitter, twisted, hurting people who want to make sure that everyone is as miserable as they are. Or they are old-fashioned worshippers of the System—legalists and fanatical religious wet blankets. What both varieties have in common is that those of us who are Optimisfits make them extremely uncomfortable. They’d like nothing more than to make us see “reality” and feel a little worse about it.

  But Optimisfits think that reality is more like a dream than a nightmare.

  We’ve learned that the worst way to respond to these people is to get all twisted out of shape about their lack of understanding. A curmudgeonly Optimisfit is a contradiction in terms. How can we be childishly optimistic if we are all angry and bitter toward those who don’t have a clue about the way we see life?

  So, in a world where there are a lot of ignorant legalists running around doing and saying awful things, draining the joy and adventure out of life, and either denying the reality of God or treating Him like a Cosmic Policeman, how do we not let that affect us?

  Let us inquire of the ultimate problem solver: Sherlock Holmes.

  In the nineteenth century, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a series of novels and short stories about a detective named Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Watson. They were an almost instant hit with British and American readers. People couldn’t get enough of these stories. Except for Doyle himself, who eventually tired of writing about Holmes and wanted to write something else. So, Doyle crafted a story in which Holmes and his arch-nemesis Moriarty are wrestling near the precipice of Reichenbach Falls and then plunge together to their deaths. Done. The End.

  Except that Doyle’s audience wouldn’t hear of it. His readers rose up in outrage and demanded that he bring Sherlock back. One chap spotted Doyle walking down the street and actually beat him up for killing off his hero. Doyle’s own mother wrote him an indignant letter, castigating him for even considering such a thing. “Kill that nice Mr. Sherlock Holmes? Foolishness. Don’t you dare!”

  So, Doyle contrived a semi-plausible explanation for the “apparent” death of Holmes and relaunched the series.

  I’m glad that Sherlock came back from the dead. I always admired his style and his methods in solving crimes. No puzzle was beyond his intellect. So, what was his secret?

  Well, in the very first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, the awestruck Watson finds himself amazed by the breadth of the great detective’s knowledge. Only later does he realize that there are some pretty significant gaps in Holmes’ knowledge. How could such a genius problem solver not know, for example, that the earth revolved around the sun?

  Holmes said that it was all about focus:

  I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend on it, there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.6

  It’s focus, people. Focus.

  You heard it from Sherlock himself. Anything that didn’t help him solve crimes had no place in his brain. The mind is like an attic, and if you fill it with rubbish it’s hard to get at the useful stuff.

  That’s why an Optimisfit is careful about what we put into
our brain. We can’t afford to clutter it with junk. There’s no room for bitterness or grudges. We won’t let un-forgiveness have the run of the place. Scientists tell us that we have over 30,000 thoughts a day, and we aren’t going to waste any of them on nursing grievances and keeping score of slights.

  We have more important stuff to do. More important stuff to fill our brains with.

  To start with, we are too busy to waste time on negativity. We have footballs to catch while skateboarding, and books by Chesterton that need reading. Why spoil the fun by reopening old wounds and poring over our disappointments?

  Sure, we will be wronged by others. But why not just fuggetaboutit? Why not keep the attic clear of unnecessary negative emotional clutter?

  The Apostle Paul tried to tell us way back in the first century: “Love keeps no record of wrongs.” That is still good advice. In the Greek language the word for “record” was an accounting term that meant registering an item in a ledger. What Paul was getting at is that the quickest way to kill love (and kill your fun) is to keep a running tally of the evils that have been perpetrated against you.

  Frankly, bitterness is for chumps.

  Optimisfits have no intention of being chumps because 1) we’d rather pet giraffes, and 2) there are skateboards to kick flip, and 3) there is a world to conquer, which 4) can’t be done if we are sitting in our rooms licking our wounds, so yeah 5) we prefer to live the dream…thank you very much.