Perfectly Imperfect
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The world sells you a dream that you can never cash in on.
You grow up seeing a happy, well-rounded two parent household with two
well-mannered children, a dog and a white picket fence. This model family
includes a housewife and a gainfully employed husband that reads bedtime
stories to your two perfect children after you’ve had a perfectly prepared
dinner at your dinner table as a family. The American dream becomes more like
the American fantasy when you look at the typical American household.
Although that was not necessarily my dream growing up, as I
became a young woman I had my own ideas of what my family would look like. As I
started to feel the call on my life to be a wife, I formed my “list” of how my
household should be run. My own fantasy was the driving factor behind who I
dated, who I became friends with, and where I worked. If I was going to fulfill
my American dream, I had a timeline I needed to meet with my perfect man. What
God did was take my dream and turn it upside down. My timeline included
children by the time I was 30 but when I found myself at the age of 29, married
to a divorced dad, and trying to recover from two ectopic pregnancies my life
came crashing down around me. Everything I perfectly planned to happen had
fallen apart. All of my dreams were shattered. I didn’t realize then that was
exactly where God needed me to be.
Isaiah 46:10 I make known the end from the beginning, from
ancient times, what is still to come. I say, 'My purpose will stand, and I will
do all that I please.
It’s great to memorize and quote scripture but what happens
when you have to live it? How many times have we chosen the perfection of our
plans over the purpose of God’s? Our plans try to avoid the pain of purpose for
the sake of perfection. When I turned 30, I finally realized who I was. From
the shattered pieces of my past, God have given me His perfect will for my
life.
Whether we choose to accept that God allows us to endure
pain, we still have to deal with it. God’s promise is that He will perfect those
things that concern us but He doesn’t ever promise us a perfect life. See,
perfection is just like beauty. It’s in the eye of the beholder. The outsiders
are the only ones who view your life as perfect, because they don’t know the
pain you’ve endured to maintain the lie they have fallen in love with. My list
was not about what I thought would make me happy, it was to give the appearance
of perfection. It was to pacify those people who thought they had me figured
out. If I had been honest with myself then, I wasn’t even sure if I wanted
children. But I thought I had to walk in the shoes other people had left out
for me.
My imperfect self had started bowing down to other imperfect
people, being more concerned about their comfort with my life instead of God’s
plans. The pursuit of perfection left me empty and confused. So when I didn’t
achieve it, I had lost all significance in my life. I couldn’t meet their
expectations because I was broken. What was I going to do? How would I go on
living? I was desperate to find who I was! At THAT point is where I
surrendered. I was too weak to continue
to fight, to pretend, to lie to everyone else. I submitted my plans to God and
just gave Him everything I had.
So, here I am! In all my mess-ups, being used by God to
empower other imperfect women to wholeheartedly surrender to a perfect God.
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