The Christian's optimism is a consequence of his faith, not of circumstances. He knows that the Lord has arranged everything for his greater good, and that he knows how to draw fruit even from apparent failures; at the same time, he asks us to use all the human means at our disposal, without leaving a single one: the five loaves and the two fish. They were very little in relation to the many who were hungry after a long journey, but it was the part that they had to put in for the miracle to take place. The Lord makes the failures in the apostolate (a person who does not respond, who turns his back, the repeated refusals to take a step forward in his journey towards God...) sanctify and sanctify us; nothing will be lost. What cannot bear fruit are omissions and delays, the failure to do because it seems that there is little we can do or that the resistance of the environment to the message of Christ is too great. The Lord wants us to put in the few loaves and fishes that we always have and to trust in Him with right intention. Some fruits will come immediately, others the Lord reserves for the opportune moment and occasion, which He knows well; they will always come. We must convince ourselves that we are nothing and can do nothing by ourselves, but Jesus is at our side, and "He, to whose power and knowledge all things are subject, protects us through his inspirations, against all foolishness, ignorance, closed-mindedness or hardness of heart".
The Christian's optimism is strongly strengthened by prayer: "it is not a sweet optimism, nor is it a human confidence that everything will turn out well.
"It is an optimism that is rooted in the awareness of freedom and in the certainty of the power of grace; an optimism that leads us to make demands on ourselves, to strive to correspond at every moment to God's calls," to be attentive to what he wants us to accomplish. It is not the optimism of the egoist who seeks only his personal tranquility, and for that closes his eyes to reality and says "everything will work out" as an excuse not to be bothered, or refuses to see the evils of others to avoid worries or having to remedy them .... The radical optimism of those who follow Christ closely does not keep them from reality. With his eyes open and vigilant, he knows how to face it, but he is not overwhelmed by the evil he sometimes contemplates, nor is his soul filled with sadness, because he knows that in no circumstance does his Father God let him off his hand, and that he will always draw disproportionate fruit from that soil - from those circumstances or from those friends - in which it seemed that only thistles and nettles could grow. The Christian knows that "the good work will never be destroyed, and that in order to bear fruit the grain of wheat must begin to die under the ground; he knows that the sacrifice of the good is never sterile".