Why Perfection?
Why do we seek perfection? I have a couple of thoughts…
First, I think it’s no surprise humans are attracted to the orderly and beautiful. Magazines, real estate ads, and HGTV don’t make money showing you the real every day mess of a household. They sell you on the pristine, perfectly polished house. I’m not saying you should have guests come and see your house as an unkept mess. But we’re all allowed to have a house that looks lived in.
As a type this, I have a four year old and 10 month old. Suffice to say, even when the house gets a deep clean, by that night we’re still picking up and organizing.
If you’re a Jesus follower like me then I would submit to you that perfection is in our DNA. Let me explain by taking you back to the Garden of Eden. Insert Adam and Eve… God’s perfect creation. They were placed in a paradise that was perfect. Everything was as it should be. We were designed for perfection.
An image from my daughter’s The Jesus Storybook Bible
I recently listened to a commentary by Lysa TerKeurst that I’ll summarize:
When God created the human heart, it was in the perfection of the Garden of Eden with out sin. And when Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, they were still aware that perfection exists. Is this why the human heart strives for something just out of reach?
perfect control
perfect beauty
a perfect body
a perfect relationship
a perfect home
a perfect… something we can acquire that would settle this hunger in our soul.
Do you know what I am talking about?
I think all of us have an ache inside our soul that makes everything, on this side of eternity, ever so slightly disappointing, given enough time. We keep thinking, “oh this will satisfy me” or “I’ll be satisfied when I achieve (fill in the blank)”. But we’ve likely all had the experience of attaining something we thought would change everything, only to be let down a short while later. It’s like buying a new car… oh so wonderful for a few weeks, but then the luster starts to wear off. It's just another car.
The truth, as we all know, is that relationships have issues, beautiful things break down, and nothing satisfies us to the level of perfection we desire. If lesser loves did satisfy us, we’d have no awareness of our own need for God. With this in mind, perhaps that longing for perfection isn’t necessarily God’s way of discouraging us; it’s his way of leading us home. For HE is the only thing that can truly satisfy us.
