“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”

I have a lot of things I need to work on to becom­ing a bet­ter ver­sion of me.  I have so many things that I need to work on to get to that point. Voltaire makes a good point:  “Don’t let the per­fect be the enemy of the good.”  I need to remem­ber to not push myself to an impos­si­ble “per­fect,” get­ting nowhere and accept “good.” This doesn’t mean that you don’t try and do your best, it is more about decid­ing what your real pri­or­i­ties are, and most impor­tantly using the lit­tle time we have every day on those priorities.

What are my pri­or­i­ties?  To have a closer walk with God…lose weight…finish college…and have a clean house…save for another car…maintain my garden…be a bet­ter friend and the list goes on and on!

Closer walk with God…so it goes with faith.  We slow from a run to a walk to a stand­still on get­ting to know him bet­ter.  As life­long believ­ers, we do our fair share of stand­ing still. Prayer, read­ing our Bible, con­nect­ing with others…floats to the bot­tom of the to-do list. It is tacked under “shop for gro­ceries” and “reply to emails,” rather than let­ting our faith dic­tate our lives.  We look to find­ing the best-right-perfect way to pur­sue our faith and we plant our feet in spir­i­tual mud.  We ques­tion our meth­ods. We won­der if we’re “doing” faith right. We worry we’re not enough, we wres­tle with not mea­sur­ing up. Christ, how­ever, says oth­er­wise.  God says we are saved by grace. Jesus died on the cross to save us from those mis­steps we’re oh-so afraid of mak­ing.  Jesus died on the cross so we could be free to serve him, not our inner per­fec­tion­ist.  God says we are fear­fully and won­der­fully made. No ifs, no ands, no buts. That is our iden­tity.  Because of this iden­tity, we don’t need to be par­a­lyzed in our spir­i­tu­al­ity by per­fec­tion. We are free to run towards him, to skip towards him, to som­er­sault towards him. We are free to leap towards him, dance towards him, look for­ward to him. His love is per­fect and we are enough!!

Gar­den­ing is on my list…I feel as though I don’t have time to gar­den to make it per­fect and so then I end up doing noth­ing with it at all.  Before I know it the weeds have taken over and the sun has dried it out.  If I just take a cou­ple min­utes every day to work on the things I love, it would slowly get where I want and not tak­ing huge steps back­wards.   There is always another hur­dle to jump in  our quest for per­fec­tion. When I work in my gar­den for sev­eral hours, I always see more I want to do.  There are always plants being moved or removed, new plants added. I feel as though I never get to a point of really being done and sit­ting in the gar­den to enjoy it. A place where I can sit qui­etly for a while, appre­ci­ate the silence, the scent of the flow­ers, and the wild life it attracts. I will only see this if I am still and not striv­ing for perfection.

Relationships…when peo­ple hang out with you they enjoy the time they are spend­ing with you.  They are not look­ing at your per­fectly man­i­cured gar­den, your extra clean house, your degree you have sit­ting on your wall.  They care about the time they have with you.  This is so true with lit­tle chil­dren.  They need us to be involved in their lives, not after we have every­thing else per­fect in our lives.  Your friends need you to be a part of their lives.  And how can we do that if we are con­stantly check­ing things off our to do list.  I would like to send out per­sonal birth­day cards…so I can start now.  I don’t have to wait until the begin­ning of the year to start.

Los­ing Weight…sometimes I get so dis­cour­aged about the amount of pounds that I have to lose that I lose focus on just slowly get­ting to that goal.  As the say­ing goes, “You didn’t gain the weight over night and you aren’t going to lose it overnight!”  When I do go to the gym, I feel com­pelled to lift every weight…every machine and all it gets me is really sore and want­ing the gym to be the VERY last thing on my lists of things to do.

Fin­ish­ing College…This is prob­a­bly the only thing that I can say I am actu­ally doing…maybe because my goal is more attain­able and I see the fin­ish line.

Hav­ing a clean house…Probably should just give up on this goal completely.…but I am not.  I will tackle one drawer at a time, one closet at a time, purge and maintain.

Saving…well that would entail actu­ally hav­ing money! :)