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Make of Our Lives a Glad Game
As a girl, one of my favorite movies was Pollyanna, starring Hayley Mills. I was the daughter of a single mother who worked two jobs. Sometimes we didn't have enough. Yet I knew somehow that focusing only on what we did NOT have was a waste. Pollyanna taught me the "glad game," turning every "half empty" into a "half full."
Don't get me wrong: I believe in optimism based on reality, not on ignoring it. If you were on the sinking Titanic deciding whether to enter a lifeboat, I hope you wouldn't say, "Well, the boat is only half sunk so far, so I guess we can stay on the ship and enjoy the cruise."
Even so, I'm puzzled why Pollyanna's name has come to mean "an excessively or blindly optimistic person." Even in my childhood, I saw people who failed to acknowledge real problems. I wanted no part of blind optimism. That's not what Pollyanna ever meant to me.
Is it possible that we have learned to equate "facing reality" with being hopeless or rigidly negative? Is it possible that we have developed habits of worry, fear, and criticism that prevent our fully enjoying the gifts we have been given? If so, we become blindly pessimistic - which is still a form of blindness to reality.
What is reality?
As Christians, we
believe in some
seriously hopeful
things:
• We are each
made in the image of a loving God.
• God has created a good world and offered us the enjoyment of it.
• We are flawed, but offered salvation.
• Like Jesus, we believe that the kingdom of God is coming - "on earth as it is in heaven."
You know how much I like the word "lament." I think we seldom take enough time to lament, to weep uncontrollably at our losses, to tantrum about the unfairness, meanness, and tragedy we see in our world.
Is it possible that our inability to fully enjoy the bright side of life is related to our inability to lament? I wonder: if we helped each other spend a few hours lamenting, might we be able to spend more days overcome with gratitude for simply being alive?
Maybe blind optimism and blind pessimism are two different expressions of the same disease? Maybe Pollyanna was right all along?