What Drives Your Life?

Perfectionism is a destructive driver in life and it must be rejected as a part of any endeavor to align with God's plan for my life. Someone might ask, is not a rejection of perfectionism a rejection of a key component of being true to God's will? After all, it was Jesus himself who said, Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.

The key to fulfilling that verse is to embrace God's role in it. Only God can supply what is needed for me to be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. Perfectionism is rooted in a wrong-headed paradigm wherein I must try to supply, out of my own lack, what is lacking in order to attain god-like perfection. How can I supply what I lack? It is foolish to try. It's like trying to pay bills out of an empty checking account. That is a paralyzing and frustrating plan.

We need a correct understanding of what the Bible means when it uses the word "perfect." Good synonyms would be clean and complete. So Jesus means that, 'I want you to invite God to clean you from the inside out so he can move in and complete your personhood, guiding you to flesh-out the image of God in you.'

Perfectionisn has deep roots at the very beginning of the human story. Eve, and subsequently, Adam were duped into perfectionism. In the Garden, God supplied their every need. They lacked nothing.

Enter Satan the Liar. He was able to convince Eve that her paradigm was off. A few doubt- inducing questions would do the trick. Could God really be trusted for everything? Don't you want to know? You will not die from disobeying God. You will become like him. Don't you want to be like God? Adam and Eve became convinced that they could indeed discover new knowledge from which God had been protecting them. They acted out of a wrong-headed paradigm that their action would meet a need that God had left unmet by not properly lining up the supply of knowledge with their demand for it. There was a fundamental shift in their outlook. It seemed small and sincerely motivated. But they soon discovered the lie. Too late. They had breached their trust with God.

Perfectionism is a self-imposed prison that incapacitates your ability to enjoy God's fellowship, be true to yourself and hear your vocation in life.

We don't "get over" perfectionism. We are rescued from it, because we simply don't have the inner resources to resist its insidious pull. The rescue comes in the person of Jesus who gives us a way back to a relationship with God characterized by total trust that everything we need, he will lavishly provide. Isn't it fitting that the antedote to a selfish partaking of forbidden fruit that imprisons the human soul is the lavish self-offering of God's Son--received in the Eucahrist.

St. Paul wrote to the Galatians: Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? (The Message, 392).

Christ redeemed us from self-defeating (perfectionism). We are all able to receive God's life, his Spirit, in us and with us by believing. (The Message, 393)