Running Toward Jesus

Perfectionists are hard to live with.  I know because I am one.  We expect perfection and are bothered by anything out of order, incomplete, not living up to the standard, poorly done, or, of course, imperfect.  We ask a lot of the people we live with and our society.  We ask even more of ourselves.  

Learning to live with my imperfections has been a struggle.  Last year, my friend Jinni helped me do guided meditation to combat my depression.  The first thing I had to do was find a memory or a thought of a “safe place” or relaxing place to mentally place myself in.  I thought through all sorts of scenarios, from beaches and mountains to holding babies to imaginary places.  Nothing was working.  She finally told me no one she had worked with had ever taken so long to find a mental refuge.  I told her, “The problem is that I am in all these scenarios, so I feel ‘unsafe’ and criticized.”  (I finally found a memory at my grandparents’ house when I was 8 years old.)

Perfectionism can make a person paralyzed or ineffective, because the perfectionist is too focused on not making a mistake.  So I grabbed onto a statement Sara Matheny made several years ago and have incorporated it into my daily prayers.  She said something like this:  “We can’t worry about falling down.  We just run toward Jesus and know that, when we fall down, He picks us up and we keep running.”  

Jesus has not made the gospel about focusing on sin, but about redemption, about relationship with Him, about faith.  We just keep seeking Him and loving Him, and He will do the transforming work.

“Let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles , and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.  Let us fix our eyes on Jesus.”  Hebrews 12:1b-2a.