No More Waiting For Perfect

“God”  

Some of us may believe. 

Some of us may not. 

Some of us may think that we have it all down.

Some of may think that we have a long way to go. 

And I can honestly say that I have been in each of these stages of faith.

I have believed that there is a God my whole life, but did I truly believe in the God that God says He is?

I have had moments of pride where I have believed that I have it all down, moments where I put myself on a pedestal because I compared myself to someone in a different stage of life than me.

I have also had moments where I didn’t think it was possible to stray any further from God. 

And I can tell you with all of my heart that for the past year, I have stood in the middle of this line, wanting to move forward but my feet were stuck. 

In the month of August, if you asked me how I was doing, I most likely said “great!” with a huge smile on my face.

If you know me, you know that I am someone who will yell your name just to smile and say hello even if you are already getting into your car on the opposite side of the parking lot from me. 

I always try to take the time to make sure people feel loved, and if I fail, it weighs on me heavily. 

If I don’t have a smile on my face, people will often notice. 

I do not tell you all of this to make myself seem high and mighty, I tell you this to help you understand why in the month of August, even though I may have said “great!” I wanted to break down and cry in that very moment, but the hardest part was that I didn’t know why. And the feeling of sadness would not go away.

And once again, I do not tell you this to make you feel sorry for me. Quite the opposite. 

But I come here to tell you all that I was empty because I was hiding from the one source that fills me with life: God. 

I was not hiding because I necessarily had anything new to hide. 

To be honest, I didn’t even realize that I was hiding because I have hidden my whole life.

I thought I was on the right track with God and in a way, I was. 

I was reading my bible, I was going to church, I was praying and asking for forgiveness for my sins.

But what I needed was not only a new mindset, I also needed to completely get rid of an old one: “I am not good enough for God.”

Now let me tell you what I mean by this:

I have lived my whole life holding on to a part of me. 

I truly believed that I needed to live parts of my life on my own before I was able to hand them over to God.

I genuinely thought that in order to be a proper follower of God, I needed to get through parts of my life first. 

I compared myself to other people constantly whether I was making myself feel better in doing this or worse. But as I am sure you can guess, the part that weighed on me the most were the lies that the enemy was telling me, “You are not good enough for God.”

I wished for myself to have the strength to move out of the “bad” stages in my life because I wanted to be all in with God, but I wanted to make sure that I was ready before I tried to be “perfect.” 

And all of these lies were the reasons for my sadness, and it took me this long to realize it. 

We need to remember:

God does not need permission to have every part of us, he already does.

We are ready now to give it all to God and have been since the first day that we made the Lord our Savior.

Why? Because when we trust him with our lives, we no longer have the burden of doing life on our own.

We need to stop waiting for the moment we are going to be “perfect” because not one of us ever will be. 

We need to stop comparing ourselves to our neighbor because they may sin differently, but to God, all sins are equal. 

We are no better or worse than the person next to us because Jesus made us all equal the moment that He took our past, present, and future sins and filled us with the gift of life.

Once we surrender even the worst parts of ourselves to God, our perspective will change. 

Trust me. 

I am experiencing it for the first time in my life right now in this exact moment, and I mean it when I say that I have never felt more secure in my identity through Christ. 

This is not just a feeling we should live by because if we live by feelings, the first time we try to doubt God, the devil will overpower us. 

It is a lifestyle to live by, because if God is the center of our lives, the devil will not survive.

I am not perfect. I never will be. 

But the exciting news is that you never will be either. 

So let’s stop trying to wait until the moment when we think we will be perfect and allow our Creator to fill us with the life that He has been wanting to do since the day we were created.