It is remarkable how in the past two days I have said and heard others say that we were striving for perfection, and always as an excuse for not completing some task or other.
This was not perfection in the purest form, which is by definition, unattainable, but perfection in the moment.
In our work we realise that we have come short or missed some aspect and we rework what we were doing, in search of some personal target that for us and for that moment we consider as perfection.
This striving for some ultimate goal is usually not inspired by our employers, whose goal is to ship just satisfactory products, in as short a time as possible, so it must be personal. It may on occasion be competition between peers, but typically not so.
It seems that we may be wired that way, to always go the extra mile. Perhaps it was drilled into us at school during our formative years or some early religious training, in that we must strive to please our God.
The irony with this is that the standard set by our educators or religion is almost always beyond reach, so perhaps it is in the striving that we hope to obtain favour. As we reach maturity the pattern is set permanently within our makeup and we may lose the need for the task masters of religion or education, but their mark has been made on us for life.
Our only hope for this self inflicted slavery is a confrontation with God and to recognise that long ago he made a way to escape the slavery of legalism and self recrimination or guilt, in his ultimate sacrifice given for our freedom.
It may come as a great surprise that God does not expect us to live a perfect life and actually expects us to sin against him and our fellow man; not wants, of course, but expects.
So where does this notion come from that God is this awful judge who will condemn us all to Hell?
We can almost be sure it comes from the Images of God revealed to us in the Old Testament, where we see his rage and anger, because of the sin of mankind in general and of his chosen people, the Jews, in particular.
However these come together with images of God’s love and forgiveness, often seemingly changing his mind and this often in response to please and arguments from people like Moses and other heroes of faith.
This has even led some serious and sincere people to say that the God of the New Testament is not even the same God, but some lesser god who had human-like weaknesses.
If we think of God as having feelings then much of the descriptions of an angry God take on a different perspective, but not that God has human-like feelings, but that we have God-like feelings, since we are ‘made in his own image.’
So how else would we see and feel his anger and his love except that he would become angry and then his love would change his anger to forgiveness?
We have been taught that certain behaviours of God show his Love and others his Justice as if these were in separate boxes in God, but rarely have we been taught that these changing faces of God show that he has feelings, as if to have feelings is not a God-like thing to have, but it explains a lot.
So then, if we can now agree that our feelings of joy, happiness, anger and sadness, despair and all our other feelings like hunger and satisfaction are God-given or even inherited from God, then can we start forgiving ourselves for all the negative feelings that give us feelings of guilt, and stop trying to control them and start enjoying and using them as thermometers of what we are at any one time?
So who are we trying to please with our aims of perfection? Is it the echoes of the training given by teachers, parents or preachers? Or is it the demands of God himself in what ever form he has taken in our lives in this godless generation? Or is it the echo of the feelings inherited from a perfect God in our imperfect human form? I think I rather like this last option. It reminds me of my real roots and makes me know that I know that God exists and why he is still interested in me personally and as an individual.
