Pessimism, Optimism or Faith

I was thinking yesterday about pessimism and faith and realised that they are horribly mutually exclusive. The concerning thing about this is that I am a pessimist by nature but want to be a person of faith and I can't be both. This isn't the first time this has occurred to me, but it is something I really want to get to the bottom of.

There were a few definitions of pessimism on Dictionary.com and here they are...

1. A tendency to stress the negative or unfavorable or to take the gloomiest possible view: “We have seen too much defeatism, too much pessimism, too much of a negative approach” (Margo Jones).
2. The doctrine or belief that this is the worst of all possible worlds and that all things ultimately tend toward evil.
3. The doctrine or belief that the evil in the world outweighs the good.

I guess, "Hi, I'm a pessimist, I expect you're having a lousy day" is not really the best chat up line, not that I need chat up lines as I am very happily married, but you know what I mean.

Having looked at the definitions, I am glad to say that I only subscribe to the first definition, if I can be glad to attest to any of them. As it is I want to be able to get rid of even that milder thought pattern from my life.

God is pleased by faith and obedience, but faith cannot coexist with pessismism. Faith says that God is bigger than my circumstances and even if the worst I can imagine should happen, God is so big that He will make things good in the end. The if is a very big one as usually things don't work out bad, they work out good. As a pessimist I can find myself thinking the most dreadful thoughts, like when Heather's home seriously later than I am expecting I sometimes wonder if she's been killed or involved in some terrible accident rather than believe the more likely scenario that she's got held up in traffic or got waylaid by some talkative person you can't escape from. If the last sentence made you breathless, well that's how a pessimistic outlook can make you feel too, breathless and panicky. At times I can hardly help myself from worrying like this. In its milder moments, you simply expect things to not work out for the best, that something will inevitably go wrong. It doesn't! Well not most of the time anyway, and when it does go wrong, there's always some good or other comes out of it.

Boy I seem to be rambling, but it's a big thing to get rid of, when you've lived with it all your life and want to change. But change is what I MUST do. Face it, part of the verse I have quoted a few times recently is, "Trust in the Lord with all you heart and lean not on your own understanding." Now the trusting bit is called faith, and the understanding part is what you know, your experiences and the things you accept as true. Now the pessimist takes what they have experienced and what they know and creates a bad case scenario as the outcome - "I lost my baggage on my last flight, after that my friends were delayed 42 hours on theirs, goodness knows what will happen next time any of us fly!" The optimist ignores this or maybe admits that all this happened so the chances of it happening again are so remote as to not warrant thinking about. The person of faith realises the possibilities but places their life in God's hands expecting the best, but knowing that even if it all goes horribly wrong that God is with them and will help them through. As it is, Heather and I got $60 off our next flight and Steve and Jenny got free return flights to England from Canada as compensation for their delay. Is God cool or what?!!

As it is, I don't just want to become an optimist who unrealistically expects the best all the time, I want to become a person of faith who recognises the facts but who also recognises they have a God who is far bigger than the facts. The pessimist in me says that it will never happen, but the man of faith says that facing the facts head on, that although I have lived with pessimism for so many years, I will believe and I will become a person who lives by faith.

So the next time Heather is late, I shall expect to be able to believe that she has been waylaid by some very talkative person which although this may seem like a fate worse than death to Heather at the time, is far more likely to be what has actually happened!

God bless you,

Steve