Perfection Myths - 1/2

Just as continued insistence on demanding perfection is a sign of immaturity, increasing our capacity to accommodate things less than perfect is a sign of maturity. We were all born to seek perfection, but some people take it too far and won’t be happy until they’ve got it or found perfection.

To all you perfectionists, respectfully, “You’re either stupid or deluded”, and I’ll tell you why . . .

Nobody is perfect. Except me. Oops, sorry, that slipped out by mistake. Maybe this was my subconscious talking.

Ah, now you see - that’s just the point. Our subconscious hates getting things wrong and making mistakes. We hate things not right, when they’re short of perfection. We’re all born thinking that the world revolves around ourselves. Me, me, me. My way, My way, My way. Sure there are times that we have to back ourselves and lead and make decisions that take responsibility, but it’s often a rude shock when we find out that we are not actually God’s gift to mankind, and maybe, just maybe, we’re not perfect after all.

I learned this pretty hard in my early twenties when I did a stint at the Centrepoint Community in Albany. In those days (before he got “put away” for mucking around with under-aged girls) it was run by the notorious Bert Potter. Basically a sex commune, Bert was the so-called “guru” who created a New-Agey private social environment, where Judeo-Christian social norms were absent (Read: anything goes). His values are pretty much mainstream now, as adultery, fornication, immorality and sin are deliberately redefined and promoted by the mainstream media and powers-that-be behind them. But in those days it was pretty leading-edge stuff.

As a young Christian, only a couple of years or so into it, my wife and I sold all our worldly possessions and moved up there. Of course it wasn’t long before my values (specifically my intention to remain faithful to my wife) ended up in serious conflict with the social norm up there, and also the powers-that-be up there. We bust up over it actually. She stayed there and mucked around. I left the place and saved my bacon from something I didn’t want to get involved in. You see, standing up for something godly in an ungodly environment is a sure-fire way to get create conflict!

To cut a long story short, in a pretty nasty set of circumstances, I found myself standing out from the crowd. That in itself wasn’t so much the problem, it was that they quite rightly accused me of thinking that I was more righteous, and thinking that I was more perfect than they were.

And they were right. I did think that. S-h-a-m-e.

Darn! I guess you could say I was well and truly busted. So I left, with my tail between my legs and recognising, for the first time in my life, that I wasn’t perfect. Hard to take, but a very good lesson in reality.

I’ve got relatives and friends and know of people I would probably call perfectionists. Despite my best efforts, I’ve yet to catch them really at peace, or happy. They’re on a never-ending chase of something that they’ll never get. They’d be a lot happier if they realised that despite their best efforts to change it, that world is just not perfect.

You buy a perfect new car and then some turkey backs into it. Your spend all weekend mowing the lawns, cleaning the pool, weeding the gardens and within days the weeds are back, the wind blows leaves from your neighbours trees into your pool, the moss grows back and the grass keeps on growing.

A personification of perfection, the beautiful blue-eyed blonde you so adored as a starey-eyed teen batchelor and who then became your beautiful blue-eyed bride usually slips gently into a frumpy blue-eyed b**** after the honey-moon is over, and reality kicks in.

I’ve done business with lots of people. I’ve employed trained, counselled and helped untold people and not one of those experiences, no matter how well they went, was perfect. Sometimes I got ripped off by the people I was helping. Sometimes I pushed things too far, or too fast. Sometimes the other dude (or dudess) wasn’t up to it, or had an attitude or whatever. The point it that life is JUST NOT PERFECT. And it never will be.

I’ve got good mates and friends and colleagues who have either found, created or never found the perfect church. Some of them believe that they’ve found it, but I’d be a little more cautious about those claims. There’s a saying in Christian circles, “When you find the perfect church, don’t join it - because it will no longer be perfect”. Some of my mates and friends fight over their theological understandings just like the early church fathers did squabbling over how many angels can fit on a pin-head, and the Pharisees and Sadducees did over Jewish religious law for centuries. The point is that nothing in this world ever is ever perfect.

The mere fact that we’re all built to seek perfection but can’t find it screams endorsement of the wisdom contained in the Good Book. That smart chappie Solomon says it all:

This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes.”
Ecclesiastes 7:29

He says here that he reason for the trouble is that things were orginally made perfect, and now they aren’t - because we’ve all gone off chasing our own crazy ideas. It’s cause is pride. It’s manifestation is rebellion. It’s theological name is sin.

Sorry to burst anybody’s bubble here, but it’s the VICTUS IN AMBITUS way to acknowledge that we were all built for perfection, and to accept reality that none of us are.