Why My Motto

I remember when I was little trying to understand the concept of perfection. The people who explained it to me must not have understood it themselves, or just not known how to explain it correctly to ME. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect." Wow... being young and not really understanding what that meant, I have taken it upon myself to try to make every day perfect... all by myself. I was always told that as long as I did my best, the Lord would make up for the rest. In my mind, anything short of a perfect day/perfect life by my own efforts was not "my best." So whenever anyone said that, I could never wrap my head around it... If I'm doing my best, my perfect best, then and only then will the Lord accept my life, my offering.

This warped way of understanding that scripture has caused me to hate myself daily for years... to expect too much of myself, to expect too much of my husband, to expect too much of my children. I have really believed, for many years, that my husband couldn't really love me until I was perfect, I would never be a decent mother until I was perfect, my house could never be a home until I was perfect (mind you I am referring to perfection by my own merits). My impatience with myself and others has become what defines me in my home... My faults and shortcomings were who I believed I was.

Anyways, the point...

Even though as an adult I had learned that I would never be perfect by my own merits, it still hadn't sunk in. My poor husband, for years, has been trying to send me the message very clearly, but I still never "heard" it. Through a series of events in the past few weeks/months, the Lord has been changing my heart. For me, I have to understand that my contribution to the perfection process comes in daily progress, even if it is just a little progress. We've all heard the analogy about how you can't eat an elephant all at once and that you have to do it one bite at a time... well I was truly beating up myself (and even my family) for not eating a whole new elephant every single day in one huge gulp!!!

Thus my motto (borrowed from FlyLady), Progress not perfection! It's not that I am not still shooting for perfection, or rejecting the fact that He can make me perfect everyday... This is just the phrase I need to use to help my overkill way of doing things relax and do it the right way, the loving way, the forgiving way... for myself and my family.