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PERFECTIONISM

Do you struggle with perfectionism like I do? Really, it isn’t that I’m a perfectionist; it’s just that I can’t tolerate mistakes in others or myself.

Even the best we have to offer is flawed. Next time you watch the Best Picture from the 1959 Academy Awards, Ben Hur, look for the tracks during the chariot races left behind by the camera trucks. Or when you put the ’89 winner, Driving Miss Daisy in the DVD player, pause the picture when the Alabama police questions the driver. Look real close and you’ll notice he is wearing a Georgia patch on his sleeve. And more recently, the 2001 winner, A Beautiful Mind has scene where the Nobel Prize speech is given, on the podium is the word Noble instead of Nobel.

—Reader’s Digest, March 2003, p. 22 Illustration by Jim L. Wilson

Perfectionism is a problem with spiritual roots. It is striving to be something in the flesh that we can only be in heaven—without flaw or blemish. It isn’t that we should give up our desires to do the best job we can do; it is that we should acknowledge that even our best—even our award winning moments—are marred by errors. We are not perfect. We are sinners in constant need of the grace of God.

Romans 3:23 KJV “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;”