You Don’t Have to be Perfect — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish Football team is a college football team in the US that plays at the University of Notre Dame in a place called South Bend, Indiana. The team plays at the big Notre Dame stadium. It’s got a capacity of nearly 78,000. Very impressive. Well, let me tell you what happened one day to one of their young players.

He was part of the Notre Dame team and he had to appear in court actually as a witness to a civil suit. He walked calmly to the front, sat down in the witness cubicle, and the judge wanted to ask him a couple of questions to get things started. Are you a member of this year’s Notre Dame football team? Yes, Your honour, varsity, he said. And what position do you play? Oh, I play centre, Your honour.

And how good of a centre are you? Well, he replied to the judge, I’m the best centre Notre Dame ever had. In fact, I’m the best starting centre in the country. The Notre Dame coach who was in the court was quite surprised by the reply, and though he was a good player, he wasn’t the best in Notre Dame history or even the Midwest of the US.

And later on, the coach asked the player why he said what he did. Well, coach, he said, I didn’t want to, but there was no choice. You see, I was under oath. Well, some people believe they are very close to perfection, or even perfection itself, and it can get to rather ridiculous levels.

Perfection vs reality

It was like when the Mattel cabbage patch dolls first appeared in the 80s. Remember them? It was virtually impossible to find one. In one city, again in the states, the local radio station announced that Mattel was going to make the cabbage patch kids available to the people in the town, but they had to go to the football field of the local university and wait, and an aeroplane would fly overhead, and the dolls would be dropped onto the field. And here’s the catch.

The people in the town were supposed to hold their credit cards up so that a photographer with a telephoto lens in the aeroplane could get the numbers and charge the price of the dolls to their accounts. And people showed up waving their American Express cards, talk about gullible. Such a thing was impossible. And they were embarrassed when they found out how ridiculous it was. How would you react if you were one of them? Well, it would be very embarrassing. You’d feel a bit foolish, wouldn’t you? Why do we take ourselves so seriously?

It’s about perfectionism, and we live with perfectionism. It’s alive and well. But shouldn’t we aim high to do our best? Yes, I think we should. But this is a different thing to perfectionism. Maybe, as I’m talking this morning, you think, well, I’m a perfectionist, I’m proud of that. But you need to be careful about this. Perfectionism can rob you of your peace of mind, the enjoyment of life and your own self-esteem. And though it’s a process that might take a little time and patience.

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Getting rid of that burden of perfectionism can greatly decrease the level of stress that you feel on a daily basis. So what I’m saying, you don’t have to be perfect. No one likes to feel stressed all the time with this burden of perfectionism. Here’s the point of what I’m saying today. God knows that perfect people do not exist. We all fail. God’s love for you is bigger than your mistakes. God loves imperfect people. Everyone knows that their marriage partner is not perfect, their kids, they’re not perfect.

Their parents are not perfect. Their friends are the same. They’re not perfect either. The people we love are imperfect. If we love imperfect people, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that God loves imperfect people even more. God knows that we’re not perfect. He created us. He knows that we were born sinners in need of His grace, redemption, and that’s why Jesus came to die on the cross for our sins. We will never be perfect until we stand face to face with Jesus in heaven.

So don’t try to be perfect. Yes, you can strive to become the best person that Jesus has created you to be, but don’t get puffed up about your own strengths. But also, don’t get down on your weaknesses either. Accept the fact that you are uniquely and wonderfully made with a God-given destiny that only you can fulfil.

Let’s Pray

Heavenly Father, some of us are perfectionists, and we live with this day by day. Help us to let go of this and realise that only you are perfect. We all make mistakes, we do and say the wrong thing, we hurt other people. And Lord, there are times when we think I can do better than this, but the standard of perfectionism, Lord, is just not possible in this life anyway. We look forward to that day of going to heaven when all things will be perfect and beautiful. But until then, Lord, help us to treat ourselves wisely and to treat other people well, not expecting them to be perfect. So, Lord, this is a prayer I ask in the wonderful name of Jesus. Amen.