I always expect the worst outcome, even when nothing has gone wrong yet. People call me a pessimist but it feels more like bracing myself. How do I change that?

“But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we. And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

Twelve men scouted the same land and came back with the same facts. Ten of them turned those facts into a verdict: the people are stronger than us, and in our own sight we were as grasshoppers. That last phrase is the tell. What had happened was not new information but a story they told themselves about their own size, and Israel believed the story rather than the report of the land itself.

“Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.”

Paul closes a long and demanding argument to a divided church in Rome by praying that they would be filled with joy and peace in believing, and that hope would then overflow. Hope here is not a temperament that some people have and others lack. It is described as something God fills a person with. That leaves room for someone who has braced for impact their whole life to be genuinely changed.