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← All Comfortable Words

August 9, 2026

Apocaloptimism

A space to slow down, and to let the words and way of Jesus comfort us, strengthen us, and reorient us to the care and keeping of Christ.

Hello, friends. The Comfortable Words this week come from Acts chapter 10:

How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went about doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him. (Acts 10:38)

This week I had one of those awakening moments. Sometimes they happen in a way that’s shocking, like accidentally putting your finger in a light socket while the lamp is plugged in. Other times, they slowly wash over you, like waking up from a long night’s sleep. This one was different from both: it was like a glitch in the matrix, something that interrupts your ordinary code, a flash that appears briefly and then is gone. But that flash, that momentary glitch, stays with you. It works its way into you, and it causes you to ask fundamental questions about the nature of reality.

I was driving down the road on the way to my warehouse club, doing my normal weekly run for goods and gas. The warehouse sits in a nice part of town, surrounded by a large mall and expensive shops. To get there, you drive through ordinary places, places you want to forget, because they’re not beautiful, nor interesting. The main thing I notice on that road: the people walking alongside it who don’t have transportation, walking a road with no sidewalk. It’s incredibly dangerous. Cars zoom up and down it, drivers distracted on their phones. And of course there’s trash everywhere, thrown out of car windows, spilled from fast-food drive-throughs.

I stopped at the light and looked over, and there was a guy there, picking up trash out of the ditch where people walk. It’s not a ditch that people notice. It’s one they drive by, unnoticed. He was methodically picking up trash and placing it in a box he’d carry away. This isn’t a guy cleaning up the ditch in front of his own yard. This is someone picking up trash from a ditch that’s dangerous to walk in, and that will fill up again with trash as soon as he steps out of it.

I wanted to get out of my car and ask him, “What are you doing this for? Don’t you know this is a complete waste of your time, that this ditch is going to fill up with trash again within a week?” But I also, simultaneously, wanted to give him a hug and thank him. Not just on behalf of the ditch, and the people who walk alongside it. I wanted to thank him for something deeper: for reminding me that there’s something more we’re called to give ourselves to. The everyday code of our lives, the operating system that tells us how the world works, is fundamentally flawed. There’s a deeper operating system at work, glitching through, reminding us of what is deeper and truer and more real and more beautiful than we could imagine.

Speaking of code: I recently watched a documentary on AI. I’ve been dabbling in both the ethics and the nuts-and-bolts use of AI in building systems. And the title of the documentary included a made-up word that I think captures a lot of how we experience the world today: apocaloptimism, from The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. That word is a combination of apocalypse and optimism. I’ll admit that lately I’ve been sitting in existential dread of the apocalypse myself. You know that feeling: everything crumbling around us, no hope for anything in the world. That pessimism pervades, and it keeps us from acting and doing good. I think that’s been a common feeling at times for most people, and for much of history. It’s nothing new. But we also have these bursts of optimism, the feeling that we can do something to change the world for the better. That optimism is what drives people to start businesses, begin nonprofits, go to the mission field, give their time and energy and money to something that will make the world better. So that word, apocaloptimism, captures both of these drives and the tension we live inside of.

But what struck me that day, and what still strikes me today, is that neither of these drives, neither of these tensions, captures the deeper Christian reality: the glitch that’s flashing in, giving us a glimpse of the deeper truth.

And that’s why this guy cleaning up trash was such a jolt to me. Because the natural thing to do, of course, would be to remain a pessimist, to drive by and keep throwing trash into the ditch. An optimist would never truly get in the ditch and clean out the trash, because there’s no real return on that investment. Why waste your optimism on something that isn’t going to bring meaningful or lasting change? As an optimist, this guy is an absolute failure. He’s wasting his time.

And of course, this is the glitch. It reminds me of Jesus, and his whole life and ministry, another glitch in the matrix, resisting our pull toward pessimism, and toward an optimism that only acts when there’s a measurable return. When I think about the guy cleaning out that ditch, I think of how Luke describes Jesus in the book of Acts. Jesus “went about doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil” (Acts 10:38). I think those who were with Jesus, seeing him do all these good things, looked at him through an optimistic frame, someone trying to change the world through acts of kindness and healing. And yet in the end, everyone was disappointed, some of them deeply. The religious leaders who watched him die summed it up when they mocked him:

He saved others; he can’t save himself. (Matthew 27:42)

Jesus, they believed, was just a failed optimist. But it wasn’t only his enemies who were disappointed. It was his disciples too. Two of them, walking the road to Emmaus after his death and resurrection, not yet knowing they were talking with Jesus himself, said it plainly:

We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. (Luke 24:21)

The problem with being an optimist is that our optimism will fail us. We’ve all heard, and used, the expression, “Small acts of kindness will change the world.” But when it comes to our own small acts, we don’t really believe it. We believe they don’t add up to real impact, to lasting change. So we’re left in a place where pessimism fails us and optimism fails us, and we’re stuck with the temptation to do nothing. This, I think, captures the essence of the matrix, the operating system of our world.

But as the disciples learned, Jesus was not an optimist. He was doing something more fundamental. A Christian missionary named Lesslie Newbigin captured this precisely, when asked whether he was an optimist or a pessimist about the future. He said:

I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

I think that beautifully captures the operating system of the kingdom. It lifts us out of apocalyptic pessimism, and it transcends an optimism that measures itself by results instead of by faithfulness. If we’re only optimistic in the way the world wants us to be, believing that some good thing we do will fundamentally change the realities of the world, or even measurably change the one situation in front of us, we will eventually fail to do good at all, because what’s the point?

At the end of 1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes:

Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:58, ESV)

Therefore, do good, Paul says. Whenever there’s a “therefore” in Scripture, we ask: what’s it there for? What came before it? Paul is saying: always excel in good work, because you know your labor is not in vain. And it’s not in vain because it’s grounded in the reality of the resurrection. Everything Paul writes up to this point in chapter 15 describes the power of Christ’s resurrection, and the future resurrection of our own bodies. There is a different, deeper reality at work, and doing good is grounded in that reality, not in what we can measure. The deeper reality is that the kingdom wins. God wins. The resurrection is real. It has happened, and it will happen again, and the world will be made new.

There’s an old story, sometimes traced back to a naturalist named Loren Eiseley, about a beach after low tide, littered for miles with stranded starfish drying in the sun. An old man walked the shoreline, picking them up one at a time, throwing them back into the water. A younger man watched him for a while and finally said, “Old man, why bother? There are thousands of them. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The old man bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it as far as he could into the waves. “Made a difference to that one,” he said.

That story usually gets told as if the point is just: something is better than nothing, do what you can. But I don’t think that’s the whole of it. And I don’t think it’s the whole of what the man on the roadside was doing either, or what Jesus was doing while the crowds went home disappointed and the cross looked like the end. The old man on the beach isn’t a pessimist. He’s out there, doing something. But he’s not quite an optimist either, not in the way we usually mean it. He’s not out there because he’s calculated the odds and decided the beach can be saved. He’s out there because that starfish, the one in his hand, right now, is worth saving. That’s a different kind of math. Not “will this change everything,” but “is this worth doing, whether or not I ever see it change anything.”

That’s closer to resurrection faith than it is to either pessimism or optimism. It isn’t a bet on good outcomes. It’s a confidence that what you do in Christ’s name is never wasted, whether the ditch stays clean for a day or an hour, whether the beach ever really gets cleared, whether you see the fruit of it at all.

So today, friend, I want you to notice which direction you feel pulled in. Are you pulled toward pessimism, toward giving up, or giving in? Or are you pulled toward optimism, but quietly afraid that it won’t actually matter, that the results won’t come? I want to invite you into a third way. Approach the next small thing in front of you with resurrection faith: trusting that whatever you do, even when you can’t see the results, even when you don’t know what will happen, is held by the work and power of God, who transforms all things, and preserves what we could never see or measure with our own eyes.

Let’s pray.

God, forgive us for measuring our willingness to do good by our confidence in the results. Give us the eyes of resurrection faith: a ditch worth cleaning even though it will fill again, a starfish worth throwing back among thousands left on the sand.

Remind us that your own Son was called a failure by the very people who watched him die, and that you had the last word, not them. Give us courage to keep showing up, to do the good that’s ours to do today, and to trust you with what we cannot see or control.

We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, who is risen from the dead, and in whom our labor is never in vain. Amen.

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