Messy Perfection.
"Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect."
Isn’t that just lovely? How many times have you seen this abused and taken out of context? Some folks will tell you to keep trying, "You can do it if you just work hard enough." If a person hears that enough sooner or later he ends on a quest for perfection that never ends. Have you ever heard someone say that God loves you just like you are, but loves you too much to let you stay that way? I am not so sure if that is sound theology or healthy. God enters the messiness of my life not so that I’ll no longer remain messy, but to journey in my messiness with me. This isn’t an excuse to not attempt to improve our lives, but it sets us free from the false notion of perfection. I almost feel like Winston Churchill when he said, ""They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they'd make up their minds."
Are you compassionate to yourself? Are you merciful to yourself? The word perfect or perfection in English stems from the Latin perfectus which means, "completed" and from the Greek teleios which mean "fully complete." Used in the context of Matthew 5, it means to be compassionate like God is compassionate, or to me merciful like God is merciful. You can breathe now. Maybe Confucius was close to the concept of perfection when he spoke about practicing the five things in all circumstances that would constitute perfect virtue: gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.
Augustine said, "This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections." Perhaps the goal shouldn’t be to get everything right, but to recognize and realize when we get it wrong and not to beat-up ourselves when we fail make mistakes. Perhaps, like in AA, the goal should be progress and not perfection. Perhaps we ought to apply Jesus’ words to our own lives. Perhaps we could stand to be a little more compassionate and merciful to ourselves. Maybe we could stand to practice generosity to our souls and act more kindly to ourselves.
Give yourself a break. Maybe the beauty is not in getting it all right, but the beauty is found in getting it wrong and having peace, compassion, and mercy in the imperfection. We could call it: Messy Perfection. Today, I will try to practice messy perfection.
4 Comments:
Amy & I talked just this morning 'bout fruitless crusades such as this 1 & how they seem to ultimately cloud vision & often lead to idolatry. Our thorn is for those in pursuit of holiness, not that that's not what we should be doing, but how it often can leave folks w/their heads in the clouds while a world dies. The more we grow & learn, I'm convinced that we have to be able to multi-task the truths & virtues as laid out by our Saviour & learn to incorporate them seemlessly into our journey unto completeness.
This journey is nothing short of messy perfection at it's very essence...
walk on bro, walk on...
me too, Rick, me too. i feel like a lot of my waking days have been dealing with the "getting it wrong".. thanks for giving me a breather through this post.
Very powerful. Why is it easy to extend grace and mercy to a brother or sister in Christ or to a stranger, but so hard to accept it for oneself?
Great thought provoling post. Love Augustine and Confuscious
:)
messy perfection? this is not a concept i would care to indulge my mind in. Yet i must agree that we cannot be perfect and must acknowledge our mistakes and progress, but through our mistakes we must learn, learn to not repeat these mistakes again. our perfection is not messy rather incomplete, i say this because after every mistake we take one more step towards perfection and on a long enough time scale our perfection will complete itself. we can only be a mirror image of our god once we have past from the realm of the living and completed our transition into the world of the dead. it is in the world of the dead that we will find true salvation and our own perfection. thats why i'd like to call it progressive perfection rather then messy.
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