Coco has a friendly Corsa who is ever the optimist In fact she is in his view overly optimistic even in the face of the facts.

When topped up with a mere 41.32l of petrol she will announce that she has a range of 499 miles. Coco is pretty sure that she announces only 499 miles because that is the upper limit on the metre she uses. But the facts so obviously fly in the face of this optimism. The other day and three miles before being topped up she announced that she had less than 19 miles left, sulked bitterly and refused to do any more calculations. She also knows that she has a range of 39.1 miles for every gallon she holds. Now to his mind that mean that after the top up she would have a range of about 41.32*39.1/4.546 + 16 say 370 miles. Well Coco can only attribute the additional 129 miles to optimism or perhaps merely to hubris.
Such optimism is entirely misplaced, would you not agree?

We can all be like that, and have an optimism which is misplaced. We live in a harsh world, in which the difficulties which are common to us all will not be effaced, and in which there are hardships which are of our own making and others made by other people for us. There is no excuse of course for the making of those hardships, and those who mistreat others, as we are reminded by the recent references to the Nuremberg trials, shall be brought to account.

But lest we sink into pessimism, there is an optimism which we may have which is even greater than my Corsa’s, which if she had anything like it she would use to claim a range, if her metre allowed it, of ∞:
Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the imagination of the heart of man what God has prepared for those who love him.

Do we love the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Do we love him?

Optimism based upon the work of Christ on the cross, unlike that of the friendly Corsa, is never misplaced.