Monday, August 4, 2008

life imperfect

the wedding this weekend was absolutely lovely. the bride was stunning, the service was poignant, the company was delightful, and the dancing was a blast.

the one qualm several of us had with the service: the minister made a comment about the bride and groom being two practically perfect people coming together from two perfect families. i think his intention was to complement the character of both the couple and their families, but that choice of wording caught me off guard. made me sit up and think how imperfect i am by contrast. how imperfect my family is. how unlikely it is that i will meet a guy with a perfect family.

let me qualify all this by saying that in no way do i believe the bride & groom consider themselves perfect and walk around flaunting it in everyone else's faces. they have simply been blessed with one another and with families that are uniquely whole.

but i hardly think perfection is something to strive for. i would prefer the minister at my wedding to stand up and say, "look at these two, how gratingly imperfect they are. let's praise God together that they have found one another & will be able to walk through this life imitating the love our perfect Father has for each one of His imperfect children--forgiving faults, pruning unfruitful branches, embracing necessary confrontation, and picking up after each other's slips and stumbles." and my imperfect family will still be there to celebrate with me, rifts, scars, black sheep, and all.

that's all well & good to imagine, but despite this acknowledgment that perfection isn't something to be attained, still i strive for it. i always have--that's probably a big part of why i got into Carolina. and there i met many more people who were likewise striving towards an impossible goal. thankfully, i met many of these perfectionists within a Christian community that started to show us how deeply God loves us despite our imperfections. that the world may sometimes clamor for us to be perfect, but God never will. He made one perfect Being, and the holiness and perfection of Christ is enough to cover the rest of us.

last year i was sitting on the quad studying with a friend when we were approached by two young women. they introduced themselves as staff workers for campus crusade, and after asking for a few minutes of our time, they proceeded to lead us through an exercise that was designed to help them gauge attitudes on campus and open conversations about spirituality and God. they had a set of postcard-sized images, and asked us to select the images that best represented certain things--our present life, our hope for the future, our understanding of God, etc. when i was searching for an image that best represented my understanding of God, i was struck by one that was extremely unlikely. amid pictures of nature, of human faces, of symbols for love and hope, there was this image of a dusty, broken, antique bicycle sitting disheveled in a forgotten and dark corner. immediately i chose it and said, this is who God is to me. this is who God is because He came down to the broken, dirty place we call earth and He went to those dark corners and dusted off the old and the misused. the worn and the tired. it is there where we see God's incomprehensible love for us. the first part of accepting the Gospel is the acknowledgment that our lives are like that broken bicycle. only then can we fully rejoice in the great measures our God takes to redeem us.

in light of that, i think it has begun to slowly creep into my head that God accepts me, faults and all, and there is nothing i can do to make Him love me more or love me less. perfection isn't going to win me God's love. but still there is something within me that makes me a perfectionist--perhaps a desire to please others, a prideful drive, or a need for self-esteem.

coming home from Kentucky has certainly been an instance of my failing to be perfect--not completing a task, taking one giant step in the wrong direction and having to back up and redirect. that's one reason i can discern for this episode in my life--a glorious opportunity to mess up & find that God (and in my blessed case, my friends and family) did not turn His back to me because i didn't achieve much, didn't impress anyone, didn't accomplish everything. it awes and excites me to get to know more of this real love of God.

something i want to share with everyone that relates to this, and i don't think it's healthy for this to continue to be a silent struggle: after two or three years of glorious clear skin, my rather severe acne has come back, unwelcomed and unexpectedly. this is a part of my self image that right now is far from perfect, and it is something i can't control. i can't eat less or exercise more to become skinnier, i can't go shopping for new clothes to look more fashionable, i can't get a new haircut to look trendier--i just have to deal with it. it's an imperfection i can't control. it's one i hate and feel cursed with and often times i find that it controls me. and i struggle with what it means for God to have made this a part of my life (on and off) for the past 10 years. this go-round i think it's God trying to affirm in me the knowledge that I am one of His created, made in Him image, unendingly beautiful in His eyes regardless of how I look to myself or to others. to urge me to stop comparing myself to friends with china-doll skin and understanding that He made them, yes, but He also made me just as I am. but talking about this in light of the perfectionism discussion helps me see that perhaps this acne is also a way for me to let go of control and perfection and rest in His love. not in the affirmation of others, not in the pleasing of myself, but in Him.

1 comment:

Amanda said...

thanks for this post, Whitney. i struggle with similar strivings for perfection, my friend. And i totally want the minister to say those things at my wedding. i think i might just write them down. :)