You don’t have to be perfect.

How many ways does He say it to us?  How long does it take to sink in?  You don’t have to be perfect.  You never will be!  That is hard to hear and harder to accept.  We’ll never do everything right.

Why does writing those words make me angry?

Is it because we’ve been conditioned to think that being less than perfect makes us less worthy of love and respect?  Is that why admitting mistakes to ourselves and others is so hard – because we believe they’ll love us less?

A good way to know if you’re struggling with perfectionism is to study yourself: What happens when you see people ‘fail’?  If she gains some weight, he gets divorced, or she looks away briefly and the baby falls down the stairs… is your instinct compassion and grace, or is it judgment?  Do you respect them less after you learn of their failures?

At no point do we reject grace more than when we are performing perfectly.  After all, we were feeling really good about ourselves, then someone barged in and pointed out our flaws.  And on the flipside, at no point do we embrace grace more joyfully than when we’re swimming in our failures.

Perhaps this is why God grants us the grace to fail — because He knows the outcome.  He doesn’t want you caught up in the “rat race” the rest of your 40-50 years on earth, thinking you had to earn it.  Because you didn’t.  Yet otherwise, you would’ve never known you’d been loved and accepted all along,and your life would’ve been hell proving yourself to a world that continues to set the bar higher for you.  And still higher.

I recently moved to Atlanta.  I used to love changing locales because it was an opportunity to reinvent myself.  In this new city, I could work hard on my struggles so no one would look down on me for them. 

But let time run its course and soon flaws begin to show.

We learn to hide our pain and weaknesses until we have a handle on them.  We believe hiding faults earns people’s respect and affections.  But — it doesn’t.  People are suspicious of anyone portraying they have it all together.

So why do we play this game, especially as we grow up?  Do we pretend because the bar is too high?  Most people believe that as we age, we grow and improve ourselves, when in reality we often digress.  We lose our dreams post-failure and become shallow, phony.  We no longer show our vulnerabilities to the world.  And worst of all, we frown upon those who do — kids who openly show emotion, their true selves, no matter how quirky they may be.  With age we lose our childlikeness, our young hearts, who we are truly meant to be.  We conform because it lessens the likelihood of rejection.  We learn shame.

You know what else I realized?  Brace yourself… 🙂

The human sin that sent Jesus to die was people’s failure to admit their failures.  They hated Him with utmost hatred because He represented their inability to measure up on their own.  And they went to hell for it.  They lost their very lives because they couldn’t swallow the notion that they didn’t have it all together.  This is how deeply-rooted the need to be perfect is.  They deceived themselves, and when we operate under this ‘golden rule’, we do too.

Don’t you see that our need to be ‘perfect’ blocks us from the very intimacy we’re trying to attain through perfection?  Our attempts to hit the mark and prove we’re lovable hinder us from experiencing true love at all.

This is performance, the ugly underbelly of religion, and it separates us — from each other and from the Lord.  He beckons us, saying I love you now.  You are enough now!  Quit waiting outside the gate, improving yourself before entering in to be with Me.  Now is the time.  Now you are whole.  Now you are loved, accepted, delighted in.  Now!

We so fear loss of love that we’re blinded to the fact that we’re already loved.  This concept is so foreign to our earthly way of thinking because we have never, never, never been loved like that before.  Not unconditionally.  Not purely.  Not 100% of the time.  Not by anyone.  And we never will be.

Until now.  UntilHim.  Psalm 100 says “Enter His gates with thanksgiving and His courts with praise!” 

We must stop pretending — and enter.  There we can drop our facades.  There we can unravel our contrived images and forsake any attempt to prove ourselves.  There, with Him, we are enough!  We don’t have to be perfect and we never will be.  God calls this place His ‘rest’ (Hebrews 4), and it’s available to every one of us.

But we must enter.

To all of us Christ offers ‘rest,’ not in the next life only, but also in this life.  Rest from the weight of sin, from care and worry, from the load of daily anxiety and foreboding.  The rest that arrives from handing over all worries to Christ and receiving from Christ all we need.  Have you entered into that experience? ~FB Meyer