“Don’t worry about me. Go and enjoy yourself. I’ll stay here and be miserable.”

He worked in the office with me, and we became friends. He was a numbers guy, and I have always been drawn to words. He also preferred bicycles to cars. For this descendant of the old grey donkey Eeyore, there was no situation he had ever faced for which he could not find elements of hopelessness. If the business was in the black, it was a temporary fluke. And “in the red” meant that we were approaching the cliff over which we would soon fall like the great crash of 1929. When catastrophe was averted, time after time, it was only a short-term gain and then the doom returned.

If a friend came to meet him at the office, we would hear something critical about him before or after the meeting. Somehow, he still had a cadre of friends. Not only that—the mostsurprising thing was he had somehow gotten a woman to marry him. How did that work? What was his proposal like?

“I’ve been thinking, and it makes a certain sense to me for us to marry for financial well-being and mutual protection against the onslaught of a most horrifying future. Whaddya say? Oh yeah, here’s the ring.” I imagined his marriage proposal to have been something along those lines.

Whatever words he actually used, he had managed to pull it off and she also said yes. For any of us who have done this and succeeded, there is a sense in which it seems unbelievable. We know ourselves at our worst and so it comes as a surprise to hear the word “yes.” I mean, was there really a period or an explanation point after it? Not “yes, well, let me take a look at my calendar and my heart and we’ll get back to you.”

No, Eeyore’s wife had said yes, and they were devoted to one another. Eeyore claimed his wife was just like him, but there were plenty of other times when I saw a change after they had talked. She had helped convince him that the glass had at least some water in it and it was not completely empty or planted in him the thought that it maybe even might someday fill up. People influence others for good and bad.

Eeyore was hard on everything. He found fault with his church. And mine. The preaching, the pastors, the programs, the congregation, his own lack of involvement, the level of giving, how his church spent its money. And he didn’t hold back on his own assessment when he looked in the mirror. He didn’t usually think he could do things better than the people he criticized. In fact, he knew most things were hopeless for most all of us.

But for a follower of Jesus on this side of the resurrection, there’s no escaping hope. Even for Eeyore. There is one person Eeyore couldn’t find fault with: Jesus. If he had been one of Jesus’ disciples, I could hear him complaining about trying to figure out what the parables meant, and he certainly would have had an opinion when it came to the discussion of seating order at the heavenly throne/table. He would have held court on Easter Saturday, bewailing all that had gone wrong, but even he had to admit—no human could have conceived of the Incarnation to Ascension overturning everything. Jesus was leading us to something way better than the messed up world of today.

Our small office staff grew to love Eeyore because underneath all the negative stuff was a heart that Jesus loved, forgave and changed. My friend cared deeply for people, even if he didn’t always feel comfortable showing it. He worked hard to help people and when he couldn’t, he would try to find others who could. He did not want the limelight, but he deserved a little more than he got, because he was happy to work always behind-the-scenes and let the bosses take the credit. In those kind of moments we could see the caring hand of God at work.

Attention lost and unlovely people of the world: As a people, our glasses are not filled half water and half air. We’ve tipped over our glass, the water puddled around it, just a swallow full of it left at that. It’s not just a matter of perspective. When the glass tipped over, it broke. We’ve really lost it.

If you want to see most things from a sour perspective, if you want an everything’s-wrong worldview of the universe, you might want to consider another faith—one whose founder isn’t in such a dogged pursuit of the people of the hot mess. But my friend Eeyore had no problem seeing a hot mess for what it was or confusing the filthy rags of our human achievements with the altogether new and wonderful works of Jesus Christ.

And as I read the Book of Isaiah in anticipation for Men’s Bible Study, my dear Christian Eeyore comes to mind. His gloominess often hid the expectation that we can and should do better, that we should raise our eyes to the heights, not lower them to the folly around us. I can hear his contempt for the things of this world in which many of us all too often land.

Such stupidity and ignorance!
    Their eyes are closed, and they cannot see.
    Their minds are shut, and they cannot think.
The person who made the idol never stops to reflect,
    “Why, it’s just a block of wood!
I burned half of it for heat
    and used it to bake my bread and roast my meat.
How can the rest of it be a god?
    Should I bow down to worship a piece of wood?”
The poor, deluded fool feeds on ashes.
    He trusts something that can’t help him at all.
Yet he cannot bring himself to ask,
    “Is this idol that I’m holding in my hand a lie?”
“Pay attention, O Jacob,
    for you are my servant, O Israel.
I, the Lord, made you,
    and I will not forget you.
I have swept away your sins like a cloud.
    I have scattered your offenses like the morning mist.
Oh, return to me,
    for I have paid the price to set you free.”
(Isaiah 44:19-22 NLT)