How to have hope when it feels like the bad things are cancelling out the good things
When so many bad things happen in the world, or to ourselves, it seems like these are cancelling out all the good things we are doing. Yet, this is not the right way to look at it - the good news is that we have a lot more hope and joy than it first seems.
Even if you literally do something good, and someone literally goes and destroys it before anyone gets to see the good thing you did, your hard work is not wasted. Because God sees it, and ultimately you are answerable to God, not to the people who never got to see your work because it was destroyed.
The good and bad things do not cancel each other out; instead (here on Earth), they coexist. This is actually good news and offers some hope. No-one can take away your good work from you even if they physically destroy it, because God has already seen it, and He is the most important entity in the universe.
There is strong Biblical evidence supporting this attitude. Let's take a look at the parable of the weeds among the wheat (Jesus is the speaker):
He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
Matthew 13: 24-30
We can see from the passage above that God wanted the good and bad to grow side by side until the harvest. In other words, the bad did not cancel out the good, and vice versa.
Another way to look at it is like algebra. The equation is not 6 - 5 = 1. Instead it is something like 6g + 5b (e.g. 6 good things, 5 bad things). They can't be mixed and matched. They are separate entities that don't cancel each other out.
Therefore, the bad things do not cancel out the good things because they cannot do so. Even if something bad destroyed something good, God saw the person's work who had done the good thing. The fact of God having seen it can never be taken away by anything bad that happens, even if the bad thing physically destroys the good work. So when we think of it that way, there is actually a lot of hope and joy about good things, even when it first seems like there are so many bad things happening.
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