[My brilliant artist nieces strike again! Unicorn Credit: Annika and Aislyn]

Come, let us reason together.

Believing the best of someone is perceiving them as accurately as you can while choosing to focus on their positive qualities, affirming their character, and trying to encourage and draw forth the good you can see. You can believe the best of someone who appears horrible, who has done genuinely despicable things. That’s how prison ministry works. In fact, that’s how grace works. If God won’t see the potential in people inclined to self-destructive, sinful behavior, we’re all doomed.

But we’re not all doomed. God sees us as we are and knows we have more capacity for good than we realize. That’s the Gospel*. That’s the Prodigal Son. God knows that we have warped the image of Jesus and God still sees how beautiful and loving we can be. When we believe the best of one another, we affirm what God sees, that the drug addict stuck in his habit can recover and Johnny Cash can play a concert at Folsom Prison because he understands the darkness they live in. He lived there, too. But he knows they could be redeemed because he was. Believing the best in you means that your darkness is not the last word. God’s love is.

Optimism is a different animal. Believing the best is central to the Gospel, not denial nor superficial acceptance but clear-eyed hope for choosing good over evil. Optimism is a cousin of hope but can also dwell in the land of make believe. I’m an optimist. I choose to be a hopeful person, often directly in the face of my depression and a constant barrage of negative thoughts. But optimism is not identical to biblical hope. Biblical hope is rooted in God’s faithfulness and the certainty that all shall be well, even if nothing appears well in my limited range of vision. Biblical hope declares that we’ll be okay, not because God will prevent bad things from happening but because in Jesus, we can endure bad things, including death. Biblical hope is perhaps the most powerful force on earth, stronger even than greed.

Optimism is simply hoping for the best, but optimism is not always rooted in the hope that Jesus Christ has resurrected from the dead and overcome every enemy, including death. Sometimes we’re optimistic just “cuz we hope good things will happen.” In general, I’d rather choose to be an optimist than a pessimist, even though pessimists have sound logic for their position: “Never get your hopes up and you’ll never be disappointed.” I’ve decided there are worse things in the world than disappointment. Cynicism, for example.

But we had a baby die in our arms. Optimism says that bad things won’t happen to us, because…they won’t. Because it’s us. Then bad things happen and optimism looks a lot like believing in unicorns. Fun, but an illusion. That was never real. If it’s joined to our theology, the backlash will hurt. “But I thought God loved me!”

We went to a funeral with one of our dear friends in Nicaragua, Carlos, who was burying his little girl. We’d suffered the same with Isaac, so I could talk with him about it, share our experience, and let him know what I have seen of God’s faithfulness in tragedy. But here’s the truth: most people in developing countries (and everyone living in poverty) much more often suffer these life-rending tragedies. Their children die young more often. Their mothers die in childbirth more often. Optimism says that won’t happen to us, but optimism is also the luxury of people who can afford to make things go our way most of the time. Again, hope in Jesus Christ is that God loves me and Isaac’s death does not change or disprove that. I reached that point, but it took me years. You can see how different that is than optimism, the denial that bad things would ever happen to me. Or you.

I’m perpetually optimistic that I will arrive on time and I rarely do. A friend dubbed this “temporal optimism” and I thought that a brilliant term. I somehow can believe, in the face of how many years of evidence, that this time I’m gonna walk right out of the house when I need to, hop on my bike or in my car, and arrive 5 minutes early. It took Kim years (and years) to convince me that travel time took actual time. Doesn’t seem like a complicated mathematical reality, but I resisted, due to my temporal optimism. I’m a little better now–and I mean if you have a very fine-tuned instrument you can detect my improvement. Like a clock that counts milliseconds.

But you can see how this kind of optimism doesn’t reside in faith in Jesus Christ or hope in God’s grace. It’s just “I want things to go well so I’m going to believe they will.” Sometimes that serves us really well. Norman Vincent Peale made a fortune selling books about “the Power of Positive Thinking.” “If you believe it, you can achieve it,” that sort of thing. I’m not against that on principle, and certainly if you believe you can’t, you have proven yourself right without ever trying.

But what is the term for a woman’s thought pattern who convinces herself that her abusive boyfriend won’t hit her again? Is that “optimism?” Or is that wishful thinking? To be clear, it’s always a much more complex tangle of thoughts that involves suffering trauma, negative self-image, believing she somehow deserves her abuse, and the ongoing manipulation that he’s the only one who could care for her/provide for her/keep her safe (ironically). But in the core of this mental issue we see a repeated insistence that, against all evidence, “he’s sorry and he’ll never do it again.” I consider that a version of wishful thinking. Damaged wishful thinking, a thought process that needs healing as part of the whole healing process. It’s wanting to see what isn’t there and convincing myself I do.

Wishful thinking, in my view, can become the opposite of clear-eyed believing the best. Believing the best, as I described it, means I will take every necessary step to keep you from abusing me again. If you can demonstrate that you are changing, I may take the chance to trust you again, or I may encourage you and pray for you but not enter back in (I can believe in someone’s redemption without havingto put myself at risk to do so). Wishful thinking and biblical hope can look very similar. But wishful thinking is rooted in “this is the reality I want to see, so I’m going to pretend this is the reality I actually see.” As such, it can be wildly dangerous. Instead of clear-eyed recognition of another’s sins and faults, it might choose to overlook or ignore them. Wishful thinking and denial are first cousins. In fact, “wishful thinking” is the nice term for an addict’s thought pattern.

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We’re living in a world suffering a virus for which none of us yet have antiviral medicine (clinical trials are happening as I type). It’s a pandemic, crossing all borders and boundaries. As always, it’s hitting and will hurt and kill people in poverty more. It’s also more likely to kill people with other physical vulnerabilities. “Underlying conditions,” we keep hearing. But I like that term about as much as I like “casaulties” when we’re talking about young men and women dying. If you’ve spent your life coping with and navigating a congenital heart condition, how unfair is it that now the pandemic we all face is more likely to kill you? Pretty bleeping unfair, I’d say.

This is not a time for wishful thinking. There might be a different term for nationwide wishful thinking. If there’s not, we might need to coin one. But if ever there were a time to get over the illusion “It can’t happen to me,” That Time. Is. Now. COVID-19 isn’t picky. It can happen to any of us. If we get it, we might survive it. We might not. But nationally, we’re still working together to prevent a much, much worse tragedy. 

Denying medical science and the suffering and death other countries have already experienced is wishful thinking. Deciding it will be okay because we want that to be true is wishful thinking. Yesterday, I read an estimate of how many people would die if we reopened everything and sent our children back to school now. Stop and hear that. Estimating how many of our children will die.

Listen to me. I’ve had a child die. I barely survived. I feel fortunate our marriage survived (most don’t). Two percent of our total population includes more children than you want to see die, and some of them will be your children. Not only can it happen to you, it will happen to you if we pretend that we’ll be fine when all evidence tells us we won’t. This is not the time for wishful thinking.** Wanting it to be different doesn’t actually change our situation, any more than it changes the situation for the woman still living with her abuser. What happens still happens, he still does what he does, no matter how hard she tells herself he won’t anymore. If she doesn’t leave, statistically speaking, he will kill her.

We don’t know enough about this virus yet. That’s a big part of our problem. We don’t (yet) have the capacity to test everyone. We’re still learning how immunity works with this virus. We know that people can carry it for weeks asymptomatically.

Come, let us reason together. People, many, many people, are suffering in many ways right now because we have chosen to shelter in place. I’m not saying it’s all fine. I don’t have wishful thinking about our shelter in place decision. I’m certainly not saying “This is fine and who cares about people’s jobs?” I know, I really know that domestic abuse–another crappy euphemism, if you ask me, when we’re talking about (mostly) women getting battered by men–is increasing horribly. Likewise child abuse. I know, better and more personally than some, that depression is hitting us harder because many of our support systems we’ve worked hard to build have been removed. Or demolished. Likewise for people recovering from addiction. Our choice to shelter in place comes at a terrible cost.

There is also a nightmarish underlying message here that home is so unsafe for so many people What do we do about that? Who’s developing that vaccine?

I don’t claim to have any medical expertise whatsoever and I don’t have all the information. But I’m representative because, like you, I have available to me the information from epidemiological experts. Like you, I also have available to me the information from people who are not medical experts who want to believe something conflicting with what the epidemiologists are telling us right now. I get that they have motives for what they tell us. But I fear, I truly fear, that decisions upon which the health, the very lives of millions of people (including our children) depend, are being made based on wishful thinking. I pray I’m wrong.

I have heard no one claim “this is all just fine.” Those saying we need to continue sheltering in place are not pitting people’s lives against our economy, as if these were two opposing options. If we let the pandemic rage uncontrolled, we will see millions of people–no, millions of us, our families–die horribly, and we will see our economy crash under the weight of it. It’s not one or the other.

I keep thinking people get this:

Our only choices are between

Containing this pandemic as best we can and then recovering from the economic damage

OR

Refusing to do what’s necessary to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, watching COVID-19 rage out of control and kill people we love, and suffering the collapse of our medical establishment and all the accompanying, calamitous consequences to our economy.

I don’t know how to weigh increased abuse of women by men in their homes and loss of income versus another one hundred thousand people dying. Yes, we can hope those people wouldn’t die if we all go back to how we interacted before the virus spread. That is wishful thinking.

I know this is all scary, even terrifying, and overwhelming. We have to choose not to let our fear drive us to anger against anyone giving us news we don’t want to hear. Right now, the fathers of two different young women I’ve mentored are fighting for their lives, trying to recover from COVID-19. It’s getting more personal for us each day. It’s easier to indulge in wishful thinking as long as this isn’t personal. This is very personal.

I’m tempted to excoriate those who have stated that “acceptable losses” of those with “underlying conditions” would be a reasonable tradeoff for us to “get back to business.” Or who tell us, about the deaths of beloved family and friends, “It is what it is.” But I will settle for pointing out that they mean “those people” who will die. Faith in Jesus Christ means we trust that God loves us even beyond the grasp of death while following Jesus Christ means we value the lives of those devalued by our society, by our culture, and by those who count their own lives–and comfort–as more valuable. When I’m serious about following Jesus, I remember there are no “Those people.” Who is my neighbor?

Our people, our families, will die. We’re helping save their lives right now. I asked for prayer daily for Luis and Scott, two men who are part of my extended family in Jesus. Both have survived but still face long, arduous convalescence at home and it remains unclear how fully they will recover. Then consider how many more we can protect by following our medical experts’ recommendations. We need a plan, such as Germany just introduced, to restart everything cautiously, step by step. Support these plans, not the ones that suggest we could have packed our churches on Easter. We were told that the underestimates we received in January, February, and March when we should have been preparing for the pandemic were due to “optimism.” I believe that it was optimism, as I’ve defined it here.

Followers of Jesus are called to live by faith. We seek to believe the best of people. This is faithfulness. We should not mistake believing the best for optimism, nor for wishful thinking. Having faith is not wishful thinking and wishful thinking is not having faith. We choose to believe in, and hope for, people’s redemption, no matter what they’ve chosen up until now. We do not make up our own preferred reality and attribute that to obeying God. Anyone who tries to lead us in that direction is not leading us to walk with Jesus. As people of the truth, we confront people living in unreality, as Jesus did, to love them. We do this with humility, knowing how easily we get off track, and within the bounds of trust we’ve built in the relationship. When we’ve seen how people behave, making excuses for–or denying–their poor choices is not “believing the best” of them. When we talk about decisions that put lives at risk, this becomes the wishful thinking that gets people killed. 

In general, following Jesus does not mean always valuing caution over taking risks to be obedient. We’re not to protect our own comfort over our neighbors’ lives. However, in our current circumstances, erring on the side of caution does fit with following Jesus because by erring on the side of caution we protect our neighbors’ lives. All our neighbors. If we end the shelter in place too soon, there will be no way to undo this mistake of wishful thinking.

*Some people would be quick to say, “No, the Gospel is that we are totally depraved and have no good in us but God saves us anyway.” In my view, we are created in God’s image and God never stopped loving us or seeing that image in us, even when we warp and twist it. God made us in love and made us to be like Jesus. God still sees that capacity in each of us and God’s spirit works in us to bring that out. That’s how we are transformed into the image of Jesus.

**Yes, there is a time for wishful thinking: Opening Day of the season, when you can still believe your team will win.