The Serenity Prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” is as simple and yet profound a prayer as any. Learning “to accept the things I cannot change” is much like living “as if.”

The other day, I was driving home from work, flustered with frustration to no end about the state of the world and my seemingly wretched place in it, when the thought hit me that I should live “as if.” I should live as if all things work together for the good of those upon whom God smiles. I should live as if I am not Atlas, holding up the world upon my own two shoulders all alone. I should live as if I am actually really good. I should live as if I am not defeated or overcome by evil. I should live as if I am more than a conqueror of life. I should live “as if.”

Life is not easy, as most anyone who’s living it surely knows. I know that life can be exceedingly difficult and hard, that there are moments and even very long periods of time that are pure and utter hell. I know that the whole of life may be nothing but a big old pit of slimy despair with mud walls so that you can’t even climb your way out.

I know that there are also wonderful platitudes out there, which fail to do any service in the face of the real difficulties and heinous evils of life.

Living “as if” is not meant to be a platitude, but a mental shift from living as if all is bad to living as if all is good–it’s not even about conjuring up the good or mustering up the strength to be or do the good; it’s about self-deceit, in a way. The kind of self-deception that we generally are already doing.

It seems apparent that we all live with a kind or bit of self-deceit, just to get through the daily life we have to live: we say to ourselves that some vice is not so bad or that some virtue is just too much to be carried out. We deceive ourselves into thinking the world is not so bad or that we ourselves are not so bad. On the other hand, we might deceive ourselves into thinking that we are so very bad and that the world is so awfully bad.

You see, when I was terribly flustered with frustration last week, I was focused on the “bad” in life, I was narrow-minded in my mindset, thinking that all was for naught and the world was utterly forsaken by God, going to hell in a hand-basket. My myopic focus was filled with black-and-white, either/or thinking as well as making mountains out of molehills–even though the molehills I perceived really were mountains. My mindset was focused on the greatness of the problems of life, on the evils sewn within the fabric of the present day and age. I had no vision for the future, nor any hope for it.

Living “as if” allows for a modicum of hope, even if it is only the hope that is a mental construct.

I couldn’t tell you what really happens beyond the grave, since I’ve only known what happens this side of death. I do have some good testimony from others about their experience beyond the grave, and I do have a whole host of fairly decent arguments that explore the reality of life beyond. But to build up hope based on something as rather tenable as that seems rather threadbare.

However, the other extreme seems equally inadequate.

I’m not here saying that we must decide what happens post death; I only mean to point out that the hope we have needs be substantial to help us get through the very real evil in the world. The hope we have helps us live “as if.”

If we don’t have any real hope in which to live and for which to live, we might as well despair and die or live it up without a care because, in that case, nothing would really actually matter.

Seeing as we are all matter, it seems to be no stretch of the imagination to conclude that we all indeed do matter. If we matter, there must needs be something for which we matter. That for which we matter is that which might give us hope for a new day, a better life.

Whether we grasp that life now or later is a matter of how we live right now. And living “as if” affords me the opportunity not merely to self-deceive myself into mattering but also into living out a hope that affords me greater life today.