Abandoning Perfectionism

DAILY BYTE

The movie, “The Truman Show”, was a clever satire which poked fun at how people choose to live their lives. Jim Carrey played a character called Truman who unknowingly grows up as the central figure on a reality show. He had no idea that all his friends and family members were nothing more than actors, and that the town in which he lived was a giant indoor set.

His was a pretend and commercially driven world where everything worked perfectly. The sun rose exactly the same way everyday, the rains always came on time, his neighbours were unfailingly polite, and his wife was perfect in every possible sense. And yet within all this perfection, Truman constantly struggled with the feeling that he was not actually living and that there was something vital missing in his life.

Scarily enough, we often perceive that our lives should be exactly like Truman’s... perfect. We pray and hope for a nice life in a nice world with no problems. A world where being problem free proves that God loves us and that we are doing something right.

However this perfectionist view of the world is not the world the Bible speaks of. For in the Bible we find that saints make error judgements, Christians die, the innocent face unfair judgements, loved ones are lost, and prominent Christian leaders have strong disagreements.

In other words, life is not always perfect. In fact it is often downright unfair and tough. Life can be messy, and that is the simple reality of it all.

Faith is not about never having problems, and never being stressed, tired or angry. Faith is not even about never having doubts. Faith is about holding onto God and the life God wants us to live, even though everything around us becomes messed up for a while.

So much of our prayer lives has to do with convincing God to buy into things as we would have them done, and to make our lives perfect. We forget about Jesus’ great prayer - ‘not my will but yours be done’. There is no doubt that God wants to bless our lives in an extraordinary way, but sometimes our view of what it means to be blessed differs from God’s. For example, God would rather have us be faithful than successful.

Paul managed to abandon perfectionism when he saw that although he had arrived in Rome as a prisoner and not as a preacher, Christ was still being proclaimed in a wonderful way. Paul managed to see his prison guards as a potential congregation!

Perhaps it is time that we started working through the kind of process that Paul obviously went through. We should commit our lives to God’s agenda and not our own. We should look again at difficult and imperfect situations and see what God could do through them. We should pray for faithfulness before we pray for success.

PRAY AS YOU GO

Holy God, help us to abandon our often vain and selfish ideas of perfectionism. If we face difficult situations, it is not necessarily because we have sinned, but simply because they are part and parcel of life. We commit ourselves to following you no matter what. We trust that your ways are greater than our own, and that your wisdom far exceeds ours. We pray that you would grant us a spirit of deep faithfulness to you and to your plan for the world. Amen.

FOCUS READING

Philippians 1:18-21 (The Message)

And I'm going to keep that celebration going because I know how it's going to turn out. Through your faithful prayers and the generous response of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, everything he wants to do in and through me will be done. I can hardly wait to continue on my course. I don't expect to be embarrassed in the least. On the contrary, everything happening to me in this jail only serves to make Christ more accurately known, regardless of whether I live or die. They didn't shut me up; they gave me a pulpit! Alive, I'm Christ's messenger; dead, I'm his bounty. Life versus even more life! I can't lose.