I don’t know why I expect
myself to know what I don’t know. Not
only know what I don’t know, but perfectly execute feats of skill and prowess
without adherence to the adage, “Practice makes perfect.” I want immediate “perfect” without
“practice.” That could hint to
impatience, of which I’m certainly guilty.
I’ve become accustomed to instant gratification and can become
embarrassingly childish when having to wait for something. But this goes beyond mere impatience. It’s not that only that I want “perfect”, but I expect it of
myself. I might try to fool myself into believing
that perfectionism is the standard to which I hold only myself, but the truth
is that I will hold everyone to the standard by which I determine my own worth
or acceptability, and if that standard is perfection, then perfection is what I
will expect and demand of everyone.
I’ve heard much mention
about perfectionism, often comments made in jest. Yet I find that the root of perfectionism is
deep and gnarly and invasive and nothing to joke about. Perfectionism seeks out, at the very core of
who I am, that root of worth; and it attaches itself and injects itself and
seeks to become synonymous with the definition of self. It detracts from who I am because it makes it
so that I can’t be apart from what I do.
It inverts that which God ordained- that I do because of who I am- and
screams at me the absurdity of such a notion.
“Do! Do! Do!
And thereby be!”
The cure, I believe, for
perfectionism is failure. I must
recognize that failure is not necessarily equivalent to sinfulness. In fact, as I walk in sync and in friendship
with Jesus, a great deal of my failures will not be sin issues. They’ll simply be moments of learning. I believe the thing God is trying to teach me
is to see the beauty in brokenness; to behold myself not merely as a mess, but
as a beautiful mess, or in the words of my dear cousin, a “good mess.” When we risk, there’s the potential and even the
probability of failure. But there’s also
the potential and even probability of unimaginable discovery and reward and
opportunity to be catapulted even further into our destinies.
I realize that God isn’t
asking me to lead a “play it safe” life.
“The goal of life isn’t to arrive safely at death.” To live a life of risk means I must take an
axe to the root of perfectionism. I don’t
fully understand right now how to do that, or what it will look like. But I can imagine Jesus, chuckling while I frustratedly
attempt to perfectly nix perfectionism. “Silly
girl!” he says. Then he comes up, takes
the axe from my hands, and says, “Here. Watch
how I do. Learn from me. I’ll teach you the unforced rhythms of
grace. And while we’re at it, let’s get
our hands a little dirty!”
