Perfectionism
By Kerri (Queensland University of Technology)
I grew up with some Christian family, went to Sunday School and attended a Christian high school, yet I had a limited concept of what it really meant to be a Christian. I knew and accepted the fact that somewhere out there was a God who created everything and loved me enough to have his Son die for me. I was willing to accept Jesus as my Saviour. However, I didn’t realise that he wanted to be Lord of my life as well. It was a kind of faith expressed with only words and it didn’t go any deeper than that. In fact you couldn’t really call it ‘faith’ because when you look faith up in the dictionary it says that faith is a strong belief in, complete confidence in and loyalty or allegiance to a cause or a person. I had the belief, and to some degree confidence, but there wasn’t any loyalty. Loyalty is a noun. It’s also an action, something you do, but my belief in God wasn’t backed up by my actions except for a generally unsuccessful attempt to live a ‘good’ and moral life.
Sometime towards the middle of year 11, I realised that I wasn’t really happy with the way my life was going. A few people who know me fairly well have described me as being a perfectionist. But somehow I wasn’t living up to the perfect standards I was setting for myself. I was driven by a great desire to be successful. I relentlessly pursued success because I needed that feeling of accomplishment that doing well gave me. It made me feel as though I was in control of my life. It made me feel like I had a purpose and something to be continuously striving for.
The problem was that once I started, I couldn’t stop. I entered a downhill spiral where the better things went, the worse my predicament became because it grew progressively harder to maintain that level and to drop at all seemed to be admitting failure. It escalated to the point where I began to feel disappointed with myself if I achieved anything less than 100 per cent because I thought I was capable of doing better.
One of my friends pointed out to me what was happening. She helped me realise that maybe my life wasn’t as perfect and under control as I had originally thought. More than anything else it made me sit down, take a good look at my life and reassess what was important to me. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that my life was lacking something. I was achieving more and more, but I was left feeling tired, empty and unsatisfied, and I couldn’t really figure out why. I was putting in so much time and effort, but I was feeling like I really wasn’t getting anywhere. A bit like one of those spinning rides in children’s playgrounds; I was picking up speed, but going around in circles.
Over the period of the next couple of months I gradually began to realise that my whole life to date had been directed towards reaching an unachievable level of perfection. Any sense of achievement this gave me was short lived and quickly replaced by the need to better it. I thought about my future and all I saw was a never-ending battle against myself where I never actually got any closer to a satisfying level of successfulness; a life of striving to accomplish feats that would die with me, and later be surpassed by someone else. It wasn’t a picture I liked the look of.
In order to change it, and this was probably one of the hardest things for me to do, I first had to admit to myself that I was only human which meant failure was unavoidable and perfection was something that was always going to be out of my reach. When I thought about it, I realised that there has only been one person on Earth who was perfect and that was Jesus. I wanted to be like that, but by myself I couldn’t. That was the other difficult idea I had to come to terms with. I didn’t like the idea of having to rely on somebody else. As well as being a perfectionist, another bad trait of mine is being too independent. I wanted to believe that I could cope myself, that I didn’t need anyone to help me. But time had shown that that wasn’t the case, and that when I tried to manage by myself I wasn’t doing a very successful job.
I figured that generally when you want to learn something you turn for help to someone who already knows how to do it. So with no other ideas about what to do, and not really any idea what it involved, I asked God for help. I told him that I’d tried to do things by myself, my own way, but that it wasn’t really working. I told him I wasn’t really sure if he could help me, or if he would even want to, but if he did and he could, I was willing to take a step back and accept his help. I also told him that I needed to know if there was anything more to this life, to explain why I wasn’t feeling satisfied with what I had.
By this time I was about half way through grade 12. I’d been going to church off and on a bit up until that time, but after I admitted to God that I needed his help, I thought I better do something about trying to hear his answer, on the off chance that he’d reply. So I started going to church and reading my Bible, searching for his answer. And much to my surprise I found that it came. About two weeks later, our youth pastor talked about having a relationship with God, and God wanting to be included in every part of our lives. I still remember her words. She said, ‘It’s great to serve God through our actions, but Jesus didn’t die on the cross so that we could serve. He died so that you and I could have a relationship with God.’ Moreover, she went on to explain that the kind of relationship God offered was one were I was loved and accepted for who I was. This was a relationship with permanent rewards – eternal life – that are not dependent on my achievements, past, present or future, or how successful I am viewed to be. It was the first time I’d really thought about the fact that my belief in God wasn’t supposed to be passive, but an active faith. And for the first time it dawned on me that I could build my life around this relationship and commit my life into his hands.
My journey over the past three years has had its share of bumps, and sometimes when I look over the edge, it can look a bit scary, and I wonder what I’ve got myself into. But there is no turning back. When I look ahead, I can see that I am going places now. While I defined perfection as my ultimate goal, I was never going to be successful. Now the goals in my life are ones with eternal benefits; ones that will bring me closer to God, and fulfil God’s purposes for my life.
I still struggle with those two things a bit – a desire to do well and an inability to admit I need help. But God is working on me. He’s also working on making me more like Jesus, and while I know I’m far from perfect, I can accept that fact. I don’t need success to make me feel in control or as a purpose for my life anymore. God was able to show me what was missing in my life and fill it. I believe that a lot of people are searching for that purpose in their lives, and trying to find it in all the wrong ways. And I really can’t think of anything more important than helping direct them to the one person in whom they will find it.
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