Growing up I felt the need to be perfect. Always. I wanted to be the smart child, the athletic child, the artistic child. The one that was well behaved, who was friends with the "cool kids" and the kids who lacked cool. I wanted to be pretty enough for attention, but not too pretty because pretty girls were called bad names. I wanted to be free enough to have fun with everyone, but not too free to well...be one of those bad names. I wanted to be everything all the time.
It was draining.
I always let myself down when I wasn't what I was aspiring to be. I felt incomplete in the areas I lacked. Rather than appreciating me for me, I depreciated my value by what I wasn't. What I didn't have. The people I wasn't close with. The places I couldn't go. The mistakes I made.
The mistakes I made.
My actions were the only thing I could control and when I came up short there, I was hurt. I tried to hide behind them and blame someone else. I tried to think of ways to avoid confronting them. I would seldom apologize, because I never wanted to be wrong; and apologizing was admitting that you were wrong.
My reign of perfection has never been 100%, but mix the imperfections I couldn't control, with the mistakes that I could, and I was at a 12% win rate.
Frankly, we are not perfect. We weren't created to be. We were designed to be different and those flaws are our differences. We were designed to be human, and those imperfections remind us of that. Mistakes happen when we don't listen, don't care, don't understand, don't seek to understand and/or don't know better. It's all okay, because from them we learn to listen, we learn to care we learn to seek understanding. Our mistakes teach us that.
Our mistakes remind us that life happens. They let us know that we will not always get it right; and they instill in us a dependency on God. They require us to be apologetic in all of our wrong-doings, and challenge us to seek God to be restored after making them. They force us to self-evaluate and encourage us to make changes. They give us the opportunity to look at ourselves as we work to be great(er). They remind us of this growth process.
I wish I had someone back then - when I was criticizing myself and feeling worthless after each fail - to let me know that mistakes are okay. That they're indicative of us being human. That they're the very thing that connect us all as the flawed beings we are. That they're our reminders of God's perfection and unconditional love. That they're our lessons outside from a text book or blog post. That mistakes are our best teachers.
So make your mistakes. Learn from them. Grow and be greater.
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