I don’t know about you, but I always seem to be on the search for perfect. A perfect self and life and relationships and experiences. It has always been like this.
I don’t know exactly when this started, but I do remember being a senior in high school. I was trying to figure out where to go to college. I had narrowed it down to either Marquette or Eastern Illinois. I was nervous all the time. I wanted to go to Marquette. I believed it was the perfect college. (It kind of is.) Nothing else would do for me. But there were a lot of factors to consider, and those considerations take time.
I kept repeating to myself that all I want is to know for sure by Christmas. Then I could enjoy Christmas and the rest of my senior year of high school. Because surely, surely I could not enjoy them with this decision hanging over my head. Because I had to go to Marquette, and if God and the universe and fate and admissions departments didn’t understand that, then they were all wrong. Because I knew what I wanted and I knew what I needed, and anything else would be a grand injustice comparable to all grand injustices in this world.
I remember the day I found out I got accepted into Marquette, but I honestly don’t remember if it was before or after Christmas. It still took a couple of months to get everything straightened out. But then one day it became official. As of the Fall of 1996, I was going to be a freshman at Marquette, and everything was going to be perfect.
Then the day finally came. We loaded all of my stuff into my parents’ truck, and I said goodbye to my sisters and brother, and we drove to Wisconsin. I still remember the butterflies in my stomach. I still remember thinking how very odd it was that this day was finally here. I still remember the phone call I made to my then best friend, sobbing, telling her that my parents drove away and that I was beyond terrified.
And I still remember that first semester. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t really even good. Honestly, it was a disaster. I didn’t have very many friends. I liked my classes, and I loved the city, but I felt so lost and alone in it. I would walk around worrying that I was doing this (college) all wrong, that I was messing it up. I had to be messing up because it wasn’t perfect. And it was supposed to be perfect. The brochures and my daydreams insisted upon it.
I bring up that time because it’s a pattern that I have repeated over and over and over again throughout my life. I see something that I want; I obsess about achieving it. I believe that my desires dictate how things should be, and then when I finally get them, I spin out of control because they aren’t perfect. And when they aren’t perfect, I start to worry about what it is that I am doing wrong. And I start to blame myself, and I start to feel lost and panicked and desperate.
But then every so often, I receive the grace necessary to be still for just a moment. And in that moment, I am able to see my brokenness and my imperfection and my desperate need for something that isn’t here. And it’s then that I am able to understand, usually for the most fleeting of moments, that we are all, every single one of us and every single situation and every single interaction and every single relationship and every single corner of this Earth, broken.
And the remarkable thing about broken things is that they can’t be perfect, and they can’t create perfect things. And therefore perfect cannot exist among or between or within us. I came to realize that when I was mourning a loss of perfection, I was in essence coming up against what really is. I was butting heads with reality and reality simply would not budge. Perhaps that means that I am supposed to.
And slowly I start to realize that our job isn’t to manufacture this perfection and our failure isn’t the lack of it. Our job is to truly live within it. It is to see the imperfection in ourselves, and it’s to see the imperfection in others. It’s to see how two imperfects makes yet another imperfect. And it’s to accept that. To accept the broken and to embrace it as the only reality that can ever exist.
My job isn’t to see the world and emphasize the broken. It’s not to help other people find the broken parts of themselves. It’s not to be a mirror to all that is wrong in the world, and it’s also not to be a sponge to soak up all that is wrong.
No. My job, our job, is to try to heal a little bit of the hurt that comes from the imperfection. It’s to understand that the only place to find perfection and perfect peace is on the other side of this life, and it’s therefore to try to spread a little bit of that otherworldly grace to this side. It’s to live by and for and through grace. It’s to try to mend a little bit of the brokenness in others by laying ourselves over it and healing it with our grace.
It’s not to condemn or to judge or to impress or to fix. It’s merely to accept and to love and to be grace for a world that is desperately lacking.
Searching for perfection is exhausting because it’s a pursuit that will never be satisfied. Obsessing and panicking over whether we will find our perfect is a fruitless search that can only end in anxiety and depression and a grasping at things that never will be. And rejecting people for their brokenness and imperfection will only leave us lonely and smug and cold and bitter.
This is our broken world. It’s yours, and it’s mine, and if we can truly accept it for all it’s ugliness, we can finally also see its beauty and its light.