It’s a pretty common idea, a buzz-worthy phrase even–progress over perfection.
I was journaling this morning, a la Artist’s Way–check it out, by the way– and the parallels in my parenting and my spiritual life struck me.
My daughter is a fresh five and increasingly reflective of her behavior. Let me remove the euphemistic phrasing here and go ahead and paint a clear visual. She screams and cries that she isn’t a good kid/sister anymore when she pushes her one-year-old sister or squirts out all the toothpaste on the sink and then fills the toothpaste bottle back up with water to use as a squirt gun of sorts. She makes all kinds of promises like, “I’ll never push sister again. I will never squirt out toothpaste again.” When she says these things, I hear, “I will never make a mistake again.”
At which point I pull her in my arms, hot tears down her face, snotty nose smearing my shirt, and tell her that I don’t want her to make such promises. You will make so many more mistakes, sweet girl. Maybe with toothpaste again, probably definitely with your sister again–I don’t want you to make these promises and proclamations only to almost certainly fail. Only to almost certainly feel increasingly worse about who you are. I tell her, still wiping tears and snot because the drama, that you are a wonderful person. Just the fact that you are remorseful, identifying mistakes, and taking responsibility makes me so proud. I make mistakes every single day. If I’m breathing, chances are I’m not being perfect, I tell her. Every single person makes mistakes. At this point, she is all wide-eyed and incredulous, ‘even Nana and Pops,’ she whispers. I nod and continue. What I want for you is not a life where you make grand promises of perfection but a life of balanced pride and humility where you know you are perfectly imperfect and confident enough to clean up mistakes and try again and again.
And then I’m brought back to my spiritual life. The one where I’m increasingly reflective on a life of sobriety. The one where I’m like, ‘Okay, but should I throw my phone away?’ The one where I am in a world of extremes. And I think there is a place for that, I do. But I think I’m figuring it out, and I believe God is with me, gently nudging me along, half nodding, half chuckling, half frustrated, not because I’m wailing because I’ve squirted out an entire tube of toothpaste. But nodding because I am definitely beating myself up because this life is so short, and what am I even doing on my phone for SIX hours a day?
I think one of my most favorite and treasured parts of parenting is a whole new lens for how God must see me–always progressing, never reaching perfection, loved beyond any measure.
