S2:E27 – Good enough is more than enough

Описание: Good enough is more than enough



by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

https://www.matthewclark.net/mcwordpr...














 



Here is my heart take what you want



Cause I have no use for it anyway



Well of all the stupid things I’ve ever said



This could be the worst may be the best



But those are the breaks



These are the bruises



And if I can’t give myself away I’m the only one who loses



And I don’t want to lose this







– Rich Mullins, “The Breaks”







 



I love this song called “The breaks” from Rich Mullins’s “Brother’s Keeper” album. But that line, “If I can’t give myself away, I’m the only one who loses” – I can’t entirely agree with it, since we each have been blessed in order to be a blessing. I know, I imagine Mullins was being a little tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a good jumping-off point for this conversation to say that if I can’t give myself away, I’m not the only one who loses; those for whom my heart was given to me also lose. If I bury my gifts, I do lose because “it is better to give than to receive”, and others lose because I’ve withheld some gift put in me that was meant for them.  There is a song that will go unheard if you and I don’t sing.



 



What keeps me from offering my gift? Today, I’m focusing on perfectionism. 







If I fail to give myself away because I can’t make a perfect offering, I think that the failure to give is a far greater failure than the failure to be perfect. I’m not sure that we are asked to be perfect, in the sense that we use that word today. Perfectionism in the modern idiom is a word informed or malformed by a mechanical imaginary. Doesn’t it conjure up connotations of machine-like precision? But you and I are not machines, we are persons. 



 



The word often translated as perfect in Scripture is “telos” which, maybe you can hear it, is where we get “telescope” from. “Telos” literally means “end” in greek. The “telos” or “end” of a coffee maker is to make coffee. The telos of an ear is to listen and hear, and so forth. The end for which a thing exists, the purpose it was made for is its telos.  Does that change the way you feel and think about perfection at all? For me it really helps, since, instead of associations like machine precision, mathematical exactitude, or academic performance, telos points toward connotations more along the lines of phrases like “coming home”, the Hebrew concept of “shalom”, “wholeness”, or even what Jesus calls his “easy yoke”.  Some versions of the bible translate telos as maturity. 



I wonder if, in agricultural terms, something like “ripeness” would be an appropriate way of imagining perfection?  We are much more akin to trees than we are machines. Jesus says we will be known by our fruit. Are the things we offer ripe? Rotten? Do they look ripe, but leave a bitter taste? Does a worm hide inside?  Or are they nourishing and life-giving, beautiful and true? 



If perfectionism hinders your heart, try replacing that word with more humane terminology. Machine precision isn’t what’s being asked of any of us. Rather, we have been commanded to responsibly tend the garden of our gifts in order that we might hand out little fruit baskets to the hungry so that they might “taste and see that the Lord is, in fact, good.” 



 



The poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, 




“To be an artist means: not to calculate and count, but to grow and ripen like a tree which does not force the flow of its sap and which stands confidently in the storms of spring without fearing that summer may not follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is everything!” 




 



We must, like Rilke says, be patient with ourselves. See the fruit tree wax and wane, endure cold and heat, spring up or lie fallow in seasons. God’s good Creation is a more accurate mirror to aid us as we seek to understand our own soul’s health. Machines represent, then, man-made models of so-called ‘health’, and when we build our paradigms, idioms, and inner reflections from the spare parts of industrialized language, something of our humanity gets mangled in the gears and crushed in the cogs.  



 



I remember hearing Eugene Peterson say he was trying his best to remove the term “dysfunction” from his vocabulary when referring to people. He said people aren’t functional or dysfunctional, machines are. To use machine language on people malforms the contours of our imaginations and changes the way we feel and think about people. We may begin to inhumanely impose unrealistic machine-like expectations on our loved-ones and ourselves. Owen Barfield argues in his writings that the language we use really does affect the way we see the world; begin by talking a...