I was sitting in the temple not too long ago, feeling overcome with the stresses of life, wondering if I would ever be “good enough.” As I went through an endowment session that day, I learned a valuable lesson—we’re not “good enough,” and that’s kind of the point. 

Now, before you come at me with your metaphorical pitchforks, let me elaborate on what exactly I mean. 

Too often, we conflate being “good enough” with “doing enough.” The reality is that we will never be able to do enough to save ourselves and return back to the presence of God. As Heavenly Father conveyed to Adam and Eve after they partook of the fruit, “dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” Additionally, King Benjamin told his people, “I say, if ye should serve him [God] with your whole souls, yet ye would be unprofitable servants.” 

Maybe we understand on a conceptual level that we will never achieve the highest degree of glory without the grace of Jesus Christ. However, knowing something cognitively is different than truly feeling something within your soul.

I know better than to speak for all perfectionists. Truthfully, I can only speak to my own experience. I know that God does not expect perfection of me. However, too often, I have found myself still functioning as if I am playing catch-up against a never-ending deficit. Then I wonder why I feel as though I am constantly failing, why the to-do lists are stacking up higher, and why I will never feel “good enough.”

Unbeknownst to me in those times, I am unintentionally trying to earn my way to heaven. God has not expected perfection of me, but in a very real way, I have expected it of myself. The irony of expecting more of myself than God does is not lost on me here.

 Perhaps this is why it can feel like I am anxiously running a race against a clock that is not actually there. In a BYU devotional, Brad Wilcox made the comment: 

Too many are giving up on the Church because they are tired of constantly feeling like they are falling short. They have tried in the past, but they always feel like they are just not good enough. They don’t understand grace.

He continues later in the talk, 

… Grace is not a booster engine that kicks in once our fuel supply is exhausted. Rather, it is our constant energy source. It is not the light at the end of the tunnel but the light that moves us through the tunnel. Grace is not achieved somewhere down the road. It is received right here and right now.

As I have been thinking about grace and my own misunderstanding of it, scrolling on Instagram one day, I saw a particular message, and it stayed with me as I reflected on my own relationship with Christ. The prompt goes something like this: Do you need to be clean to get in the shower? 

The perfectionist might answer “no” almost immediately, but upon further reflection, may recognize their own propensity to shuck off as much mud and gunk as they can before they (metaphorically) get in the shower. The perfectionist’s thought can go something like this: “I know that I need to come to Christ, but before I do that, lemme do this one thing first, and then I’ll go to Him. Maybe I won’t even need to bother Him because I already figured it out.” 

What I have personally failed to acknowledge is that if I would just get in the shower, if I would just allow myself to experience, to feel in my soul, the Atonement of Jesus Christ, I would become the person that I am capable of being. Christ does not need me to ‘get clean’ before I approach Him, that is the very purpose He is there.

But shame is the power by which perfectionism is run, and it is not so easy to let go of, even if I know it is actually quite ineffective in motivating people. It can feel shameful to rely on other people, even Christ. Even though I know it is not true, it often feels like I should be able to do it by myself, and I’m a burden if I cannot.

However, we can develop the ability to recognize that we do not need shame to approach Christ in our imperfections. In the beginning, we were provided with a Savior because Heavenly Father knew that we would fall short, not because He wanted us to live in the shadow of an impossible standard. As Elder Holland has said: 

… except for Jesus, there have been no flawless performances on this earthly journey we are pursuing, so while in mortality, let’s strive for steady improvement without obsessing over what behavioral scientists call “toxic perfectionism.”

While I can appreciate the succinct way in which Elder Holland dismantled “perfectionism” in this conference address, shame is a difficult beast to shuck.

As a sort of antithesis to shame, faith may become something helpful to cling to. I do not refer to ‘faith’ here as a throw-away answer like “just have more faith” or “pray it away.” This is not helpful discourse. 

I am referring to faith here as trust and, by extension, genuine vulnerability before Christ. When we talk about putting something on the altar, we talk of surrendering ourselves to Him. The act of surrendering is the ultimate act of faith.

While it is not easy to give of ourselves, our talents, and our time, I would postulate that it can be easier to give of those ‘positive’ things than to surrender the ‘ugly’ parts. I have probably clung more fervently to my own experience of anxiety because it feels like an unworthy thing to offer up to Christ. Certainly, I am more willing to surrender other attributes or talents that feel better to put on display or give over.

So, what does it mean for us to offer our shame, our pride, our guilt, our anxiety, and our depression to Christ? What does it mean to feel like you have no worthy gift to give and yet give it to Him anyway? What does it mean to surrender all upon His altar? 

In Luke, we read the story of the widow’s mite: 

And he looked up and saw the rich men casting their gifts into the treasury. And he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites. And he said, Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had [emphasis added].

Christ will not turn us away in our penury or in our brokenness. In fact, He wants us to approach Him in our weakness. He says, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy leaden, and I will give you rest,” and further states, “My grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.” Our Savior does not look at our comparatively ‘meager’ offerings, like the widow’s mite, and tell us we are not enough. He takes our offerings, whatever they may be, and He calls us His. 

In a recent conference address, Elder Kearon added further to this idea. He said, 

… our Father’s beautiful plan … is designed to bring you home, not keep you out. No one has built a roadblock and stationed someone there to turn you around and send you away. In fact, it is the exact opposite. God is in relentless pursuit of you [emphasis in original].

He continues, 

If you are prone to worry that you will never measure up or that the loving reach of Christ’s infinite Atonement mercifully covers everyone else but not you, then you misunderstand. Infinite means infinite. Infinite covers you and those you love [emphasis in original].

The fact is we are not meant to do this life alone. We are not meant to be “good enough,” and we quite literally cannot “do enough.” We are meant to rely on the strengthening power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. We are meant to turn to Christ and be perfected in Him. I can admit that it feels hard to wait on the Lord, to be patient in becoming whole. However, as Brad Wilcox once said at a devotional: “Time is the medium through which the Atonement of Jesus Christ is made manifest in our lives.” So be patient, let go of your shame and perfectionism, offer the things that feel unworthy, get in the dang shower, and let Christ help you become whole. Know that I am attempting to do the same. It may take time, but we have the assurance that it is worth it.

The post A Letter To My Fellow Perfectionists appeared first on Public Square Magazine.

Continue reading at the original source →