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"Dang it, Jim, I'm a realist, not a pessimist!"

by James Barringer  
12/11/2009 / Christian Living

A few weeks ago, my friend Alexandra asked me, "Why do so many pessimists call themselves realists?"

Without time to think of a more profound answer, I said, "Because reality gives a person plenty of reasons to be a pessimist."

The funny thing, which I didn't tell her, is that I was one of those people for a long time. I remember quite clearly being in twelfth grade and mocking my Spanish teacher when she tried to read heartwarming stories from "Chicken Soup for the Soul." "Reality isn't made of stories like that," I chided. "Hey, I'm not a pessimist. I'm just calling it like I see it."

Like I told Alexandra nine years later, the reality that I'd been through had given me a lot of reasons to see the negative in the world. It wasn't the harshest reality that a person could have, but it involved a broken family, doubts about my father's love, growing up sooner than I wanted, living with a single working mother. Those are the kind of things that no teenager should have to go through, and from where I sat, I couldn't find a reason why I should see the world as anything other than a place where big and beautiful dreams went to die.

Indeed, you'd almost have to be a nut to look at all the pain and suffering in the world and not be a pessimist. You'd either be a nut or you'd be someone who doesn't think that the empirical evidence tells the whole story.

The truth is that reality, a lot of the time, is what you choose to make it. A lot of things happen to us in our lives, and it's hard to tell at first if those things are "good" or "bad." I don't mean morally good or bad, I just mean the terms the way people usually mean them when they ask why bad things happen. A lot of the things that made my teenage years painful are things that I consider to be really beneficial to me in the long run. I wouldn't be the person I am today without those things, and the way I was forced to grow in order to overcome them. So, was the reality that they were bad things that were painful to me, or was the reality that they were temporarily painful things that ultimately ended up being good for me?

It's quite foolish to look at the "reality" of a situation and call it bad, using that as justification for pessimism, when that same reality could be used as a springboard to some of the best things that could happen to a person. Is the "reality" the facts on the ground, which are often painful and bleak, or is the reality the potential for good and personal growth, which is bright and hopeful? You can see that focusing on the former, to use the conventional terminology, will make a person a pessimist (not a realist at all), while focusing on the latter will make a person an optimist.

In other words, we have to answer the question of whether the potential for good is something as equally "real" as the tangible pain and disappointment that we feel when a thing happens. If it is, then we can hardly call any given thing good or bad. We have to reserve judgment until we see what happens as a result of it. A person who calls himself a realist while criticizing present circumstances is a fool - not because he is justifying his pessimism, but because he is presuming to judge the present without considering its potential for good, and thus rendering an incomplete, inaccurate judgment.

One example might be childbirth. Someone who witnessed a woman screaming in the delivery room would certainly call such a thing bad, because all he would see is the pain and the blood and the labor. But this judgment would be inaccurate because it doesn't take into account the future joy. Childbirth must obviously be worth it, or else a billion women every year wouldn't bother having babies. The pain must not be the whole story, the whole reality. The potential, the future good, "the hope of glory" as Colossians 1 says, must be part of reality as well.

Why does a pessimist call himself a realist? I can't speak for all former realists, but I can speak for me. At the time, I didn't realize this is what I was doing, but my heart was scarred. I didn't want to hope because I didn't want to be let down, so I stopped believing in hope. That aspect of reality, the future-good aspect, wasn't part of my reality anymore. So there I was, operating from a broken reality, seeing only the bad and thinking I was seeing the whole picture.

I think that, if you encounter a person who hides his pessimism beneath the label of realism, you may be looking at a person who has been deeply hurt in the past and needs a reason to believe in hope again. You're seeing someone who may believe with his head, but certainly does not believe with his heart, that God really does turn all things into good, the way the Bible claims in Romans 8. Yet if God does indeed turn everything to good, then the reality is that nothing that happens to us is entirely bad. It has infinite potential for good in the hands of an infinitely good God, and it carries a promise that if God allows it to happen to someone who loves him, he will bring good out of it. That is reality.

And it's a difficult reality because bad circumstances have a certain gravity to them, a gravity that pulls our heads back down to them whenever we try to lift ourselves toward God. Maybe you can identify with the feeling, when things are going wrong in your life, that you don't really want to look at the positive, that you just want to dwell on the negative for a while. That's the gravity I'm talking about. And it's a gravity so strong that some people don't realize you can break its chains and soar skyward. Even when there's nothing actually going wrong in their lives, they're so scarred by their pain and past wounds that they can't fathom the idea that there's any other way to be. But that's a partial reality. Every circumstance can be, and will be, turned for good.

That's why I say that, to believe the things I've written here, you'd either have to be a nut or you'd have to be someone who doesn't believe that the empirical evidence tells the whole story. We don't believe that the suffering we can see and touch is really the story of humanity. We believe there is a great God behind it, intangible with the senses but tangible through the good that he brings in people's lives. Look at any church anywhere and you will find people who broke the chains of addictions, shattered the pain of divorce or abuse or broken childhoods, overcame selfishness and arrogance and racism and bigotry, through the power of a great God who uses even those things to his glory. Yes, everything in our lives has infinite potential for good in the hands of an infinitely great God. When we say something is bad, we can only say that it is presently bad, because we cannot speak for the future, and the good that may be waiting for us just over the horizon.

So what is reality? I think we must conclude that reality is neither good nor bad on its own. It only becomes good or bad as a result of what people do with it. Either the pain wins, or the pain is overcome and destroyed, turned for good by a God whose power knows no bounds. When you look at reality, at the circumstances, the thing that makes you an optimist or pessimist is whether you see the momentary bad or the potential for good. Every pain carries a choice: am I going to wallow in this and let it run me, or am I going to grow and improve from it, overcome it, and thereby destroy it? Most realists are people who have made the first choice and think, because of their experience, that pain is the most powerful thing in the universe. But I'm a living testimony to the fact that this is not the truth.

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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