A Discovery of Imperfection

My life is messy.

I avoid cleaning even though I know shouldn’t. I want clear counters, clean floors, and neatly folded laundry, but when I do engage in chores, I turn perfectionist. I line up everything in organized stacks, following a never ending cycle of tangents and distractions that bring cleanliness to unseen cracks but leave the spaghetti-stained pans in the sink.

It’s exhausting, and it never stays.

It spills over, tips over, runs over until I’m standing on a black-marked floor staring at another pile of dishes, and wishing I could get in my bed without throwing the unfolded clothes on the floor.

I’m left in this maddening place of imperfection. Even the characters I pull and prod through the ups and downs of a story can’t make of themselves anymore perfection than I can give them. They’re hopelessly, terribly flawed—ink stains on my thoughts and fingertips.

I crave continuity and cohesiveness—the right words coming together in the perfect form to create something so beautiful there’s nothing left to say. I want it in my stories. I want it in my life. The inner parts of my heart are craving a home I once knew that was perfect and a life I once walked where my skills and abilities flourished under the tutelage of a Father who is God.

I don’t think I’m the only one.

Maybe the absolutes I face in the cries of politics, fads, and opinions are actually all of us clinging to things we hope are permanent, unchanging truths. We want rightness. We want the answers. We used to have them. Our little embryo-like spirits were once nourished in a place of light, truth and love. The reflection of that is still inside us, hungry for a confidence we once had.

So we rail and shout, dismiss and hurt each other in a search for perfection. We wrangle all the parts of us and others into categories and try to fill ourselves with self-righteousness to counteract the panic we feel when we step back and see how unfair and crazy this place we are in really is. We want to make it right. We know in our hearts that it can be.

Why did our Perfect Father send us here? How can He continue to send more children to us: imperfect parents with our hands already too full of heath food pamphlets and warning labels? What was the reason for all this?

The line is always drawn straight between fear and love. We can’t have them both at once.

And if God didn’t send us here to bathe in our fears, to wallow in the avalanche of insecurities, then the other side has to be He sent us here to find love.

Nothing stays, my children grow. The people I love die. The friends I make move. I move. I leave behind bits of my heart, scattered among faces and people and days I cannot count as anything but glimpses of heaven, even when the loosing, and growing, and moving hurts so badly I think it will swallow me.

I see then God has not sent me here to live in perfection. I had that once. I know it already. He has not sent me here to sink into despair and lose myself either. Feeling sorrow, pain, loneliness, and anger in all their hideous, soul-wrenching beauty is how I come to understand love.

It’s how I find an inexhaustible spring of love inside myself—an endless capacity for compassion, empathy, and understanding. It’s how I am weaved into your story and you into mine.

My hope falls into place around that single thought. Peace returns to the things I care most about. I find courage in reloading a dishwasher and sweeping a floor one more time. Courage in the idea that I can put something back again, and again, and again if I need too. It can always be cleaned, repaired or replaced.

I can always repent.

The parts of my heart I leave behind are never wasted.

And if I create an imperfect book, I can find the courage to keep writing despite that. It’s okay to give what I have in the hope that it helps one person find a bit more love.

Leave it all in God’s hands, where broken things are made perfect again.