Letting Go of the World’s Ideas of Perfection

“I often think that the ideal of our perfection that we set up, and often go through torture to achieve, may not be God’s idea of how He wants us to be at all. That may be something quite different that we never would have thought of, and what seems like a failure to us may really be something bringing us closer to His will for us.”

~Caryll Houselander~

Letting go of our false ideas of “perfect” might be the most difficult thing about being a human being — for many it is a life-long struggle to let go of what the world is saying we ought to be, and embrace God’s idea of who He created us to be.

Often the world’s ideals and our God-given purpose can stand in direct opposition to each other. Not only do they not “get along” but they often compete with each other.

Our own brokenness and lack of formation can further confuse our ideas of perfection.

Often, our “failures” in God’s eyes might look like “success” in our own eyes or the eyes of the world, but any “successes” that bring us farther from our ultimate goal of Heaven, are in all actuality failures.

Sometimes, they can be far more dangerous failures because they appear to be success. Only on closer examination and introspection can we begin to see that when pursuing the world’s standards of perfection they almost always inevitably pull us away from the most important things in this life and put us on a dangerous trajectory leading us far from God.

Look at Hollywood and Wall Street, you will find many “successful” men and women who are frankly miserable when it comes to their primary relationships and achieving a lasting happiness that can not be taken from them, despite the sufferings that come their way.

Think about it, how happy can a person truly be without faith, fidelity and true life-giving love in their lives? How happy can a person be if their happiness relies upon something that can be snapped away from them in an instant?

Build your happiness on God and that happiness will never fail. Build your happiness on prestige or status or wealth or appearances and you will never find the happiness you are desperately grasping for — in this life or the next!

That isn’t to say that we ought not to seek perfection or even success in our lives — but the perfection God asks us of is a perfection of LOVE and the success God asks of us is knowing, loving and serving God in this life and enjoying eternal happiness with Him in Heaven.

Think about it. Will we really care about money or fame or popularity in those last moments of our life? Even more importantly, will those things be the things that distracted us from what really matters in life?

At the final judgment, we will be judged on two things and two things alone: DID WE LOVE GOD AND DID WE LOVE OUR NEIGHBOR AS OURSELF?

Those two questions are the only two questions that will matter in the end.  Obviously, how to best love God and our neighbor can be confusing sometimes. But the good news is that we have been given a Church to help us navigate all those questions.

And we are going to fail, but that’s what confession is for. Shout-out for the grace of the Sacrament!

That’s also what the WORD OF GOD is for and that is what you and I are there for too, because one day God will ask how well we helped to direct our neighbor to Him, too — which is why we have to make knowing, loving and serving God in this life our definition of success and our standard of perfection.

All the more reason to stop torturing ourselves about things that really don’t matter in this life — frankly, it’s why we need to reject the world’s idea of perfection so we can pursue the things that really matter and we’ll really care about in our last moment on this Earth.

Let’s allow this time we have to be the beginning of something truly beautiful.  Let’s allow LOVE to be the measure by which we measure ourselves and let’s allow God’s truth to fill our hearts until they are overflowing into our lives and the lives of the people around us, too.

So throw out those ridiculous standards of perfection.  Free yourself to love and be loved!  Free yourself to be that perfectly beautiful Saint God created you to be!

Happy Weekend to you!