On Being Perfect

Just finished Moroni 10:34.
  Started a 90-day reading challenge for the Book of Mormon on March 23, 2010.
     90 Days Julie, not 350. 
Some things just kind of go like that.  We accept challenges in our lives, looking for them to motivate us and help us do something more than just sit and watch the world pass by while we vegetate in our own little universe.
And then we don't quite make the challenge.
  That's when it's easiest to give up on it.  To quit. To walk away from our perceived deadline and decide we're a failure anyway, so why bother?

That attitude has been one of my biggest downfalls - my quest for perfection or nothing.  And since I really can't be perfect at anything, in spite of my best efforts, I settle too often for nothing.  Okay, if I can't keep a spotless house, than who cares if it's a total disaster!  Okay, if I ate something early in the day that killed all my plans for a nutritionally successful day, then throw all care to the wind, the rest of the day is a food fest frenzy!   If I can't be skinny then I'll be fat.

But one of the things I'm learning as I get older is that it's perfectly all right not to be perfect any more.  I know there is a lot of pressure to be perfect surrounding all of us.  It's valid.  We've been commanded to be perfect even as Christ.  A pretty tall command and one we're all trying hard to achieve.  But we forget that we don't have to do it all in one day, or even 90 days for that matter.  We do not have to be perfect TODAY.  We just need to be working on it.

As I said, I just finished reading Moroni 10:34.  But the verse that struck me most just now was Moroni 10:32.  "Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him."  Whoa, did I read that right?  It didn't say "come unto Christ and be perfect."  It said, "be perfected IN him."   And after we do all we can do to follow him, and love God with all our "might, mind and strength"  then "is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ."  

I am afraid my quest for perfectionism does not allow me to place my faith in my Savior.  It doesn't allow me to fail and keep on working at it.  So that's what I'm learning - that after I fail, I can keep on working at it.  That even if I didn't make the 90 day Book of Mormon challenge, I did make the important challenge, just not in 90 days.  For the purpose of the challenge was not to read it in 90 days, but to READ IT.

And if I can't lose ALL the weight I've set a goal to lose this month, the important thing is to lose something - to end up at the end of the month just that much healthier than I was on the first day of the month.  Poor choices early in the day don't mean I have to make poor choices all day.  Just because I can't have a spotless house doesn't mean I can't do something to keep clean what I can clean ... it flows into every aspect of my life.  Just because I can't take the day off and go serve in a soup kitchen doesn't mean I can't let someone know I care.

I need to do what I can to be the person God wants me to be and then place my faith in the power of the Atonement to finish the product, to perfect me IN Christ.  Now that's something, I believe, that is achievable.