The Best is the Enemy of the Good

 "The good is the enemy of the best."

"If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well." --Philip Stanhope

"Winner's never quit, and quitters never win.” -- Vince Lombardi

Maybe quotes like these inspire you, but I find them exhausting. First of all, how do you pinpoint your best? We aren't robots. Our performance and skills shift from one day to the next. Some mornings, we do well to drag ourselves out of bed. Others, we can plow through a mile-long "to-do" list. 

And why do we hate on quitters so much? I beg to differ with the football coach, Vince Lombardi. Winners do quit and therefore quitters win. As a coach, Lombardi had to have known the dangers of  overtraining athletes. When athletes don't quit at the appropriate time, they don't get stronger. They get injured.  Sometimes to the point that they can never play a sport they love again.  

If we don't know when to quit, we are at risk for some serious injuries. Perfectionism is a danger to our mental, spiritual, and physical health. It is a toxic drive fueled by fear and shame, not love. That drive runs us into the ground and takes others down with us.

I suspect a perfectionist was behind the loathsome idea of attendance awards. Why do sick people get an award for showing up to infect classmates or co-workers? Why don't we recognize and support self-care? One can only hope that attendance awards will become a distant memory of pre-pandemic life.  

If you are a perfectionist and still reading, I applaud your fortitude. If you choose to continue, buckle up and get ready for a rough ride. The following will be a seismic shock to your system. 

My denomination is grounded in the teachings of a perfectionism. The term, "Protestant work ethic" was born out of Calvin's stern focus on diligence, discipline and frugality. Given that foundation, we keep working hard. We don't quit. It's our way. We offer programs that served our communities in the 1950s and wonder why people don't respond today. Tragically, we begin to serve our empty and aging buildings more than our hurting neighbors. We often focus on such improvements because they are far less painful to repair than our relationship with perfectionism, God, ourselves, and others. As we frantically try to prop up the past, we don't even notice that the church has already dead.  

The Spirit doesn't breathe through bricks and mortar. The Spirit breathes through faithful souls who open themselves to love.  Such souls don't strive for perfectionism. They strive to love and be loved. According to Scripture, "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful...Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." (1 Cor. 13:4-5 &7).  

My encounters with perfectionism -- either my own or my neighbor's -- reveal the exact opposite of love.  In the absence of patience and kindness, perfectionists are often irritable, resentful, arrogant, and rude as they insist on their own "perfect" way.  

My inner perfectionist is furiously jumping up and down as I write this, and screaming in my head: "Jesus told his disciples to be 'perfect just as their heavenly father is perfect.'" (Matt. 5:48) But the original meaning has been lost in translation. The Greek word is teleios, and it could mean ‘perfect’ but more often it referred to maturity or wholeness. Jesus asked his disciples to mature and grow into a sense of wholeness or union with God. In other words, progress not perfection.    

Again, my inner perfectionist is going wild in my brain. "But there are professions that demand perfection." No one wants a brain surgeon, air traffic controller or aerospace engineer to approach their work with a laissez fair attitude. But attention to detail is not the same thing as perfectionism. Attention to detail requires planning, organization, focus, and reliability. Perfectionism demands more. Perfectionism insist that if you are not operating at 100 percent all day every day, then you are not just failing. You are a failure.   

If Jesus didn't demand perfection from his disciples, why do we demand it from ourselves and our neighbors? I am guilty of worshipping perfectionism more than I worship God. This is evident in the way I respond when I or someone else makes a mistake. It is evident in the way I feel about myself when I am sick, which is guilty. I'm letting people down. I should suck it up and keep going. It is evident when I am embarrassed to tell the truth about something I forgot or did incorrectly. 

This is not to say we should never feel guilty when we make a mistake. Guilt is healthy. It can become a catalyst for progress. When we make amends and seek to change our behavior, we discover divine wholeness. If we worship perfectionism, our guilt will go bad. Shame will grow like mold on food left in the fridge far too long, and the guilt will be wasted. We won't celebrate our progress. No matter how much we improve, the voice of shame will run on a constant loop with phrases like, "You are not enough. You should do better. You should do more."  

How do I know Jesus wasn't a perfectionist? Look who he chose as followers. Then look at the Gospels, particularly in the original Greek language. The New Testament is written in common, street language and it is filled with errors that would make a classical Greek scholar cry. Clearly, God was trying to send us a message, and we have missed the point for centuries. God's perfect love does not in fact require us to be perfect. God's love is not communicated through perfect people who use perfect grammar. (Honestly, I'm sure that last sentence makes my mother, a high school English teacher, sob from heaven. God rest her soul.) 

God's perfect love is shared through imperfect people who show up as they are and say, "Here I am. Work through me today. You know where I am scared and wounded. You know the work that needs to be done. You know my capabilities and who I have the potential to become."

Given the way Jesus turned our value systems upside down and inside out, it is no surprise that Scripture challenges the notion that the good is the enemy of the best. Scripture proclaims the exact opposite. When our best work is driven by perfectionism, we become the enemy of God's goodness.

I confess that I stopped writing blog entries because I told myself that I didn't have time to do it the right and perfect way. Since I have dyslexia, editing is arduous and time consuming. Editing my own work is especially difficult. I don't see what is so clear to others. I know typos and missing words are a distraction to readers. Perfectionism told me I needed to wait until I had time to do it right. After all, a job worth doing is worth doing well.  

Despite the perfectionist loop playing in my mind, I heard a divine whisper the other day. A friend rightfully suggested I either update my blog or take it down. Oddly enough, even though I am dyslexic, I have always loved to read and write. I learned as a child how to compensate and look for context clues. So what was keeping me from doing this thing I love so much? Perfectionism. When it doesn't frantically drive us to exhaustion, it paralyzes us. 

So here I am. Imperfect, but perfectly loved by God and hoping to help others as we seek to grow in divine wholeness. Should you stumble over a grammatical error, a typo, or a missing word, I apologize and pray we can all remember that, "the best is the enemy of the good."