Why do we love things tied up in bows?

I’m not talking about presents wrapped in shiny paper and tied in sumptuous bows (although I do love them), i’m talking about life. Maybe it’s just me, so I’ll make this personal.

Life is messy right? The t’s aren’t always crossed, and the i’s most certainly aren’t always dotted. 

I am an organised girl – I file away my bank statements in the right section of my ‘House ‘stuff” folder. I love to-do lists and I most definitely love the yummy satisfaction in crossing off the done items.

Sometimes I wish I could cross of the things of life-

Job. Tick. Sorted.

Worry about family. Tick. Sorted.

Life plan. Tick. Sorted

 

The thing is, life is full of grey areas, journeys, loose ends, uncertainties. It can be turned upside down with one phone call, one prognosis, one sentence. It is full of things we can’t prepare for.

The battle I’m fighting is against perfectionism. A common battle. Maybe yours too. It's the tension of living in the gap between how things really are, and how you ideally want them to be.

The funny thing is, we are often the ones setting these standards. We take God off the throne and place perfectionism there instead. Those are what we worship, those are what we aim for, seek, desire.

When you aim for perfection, you discover it’s a moving target.  ~George Fisher

I love people. I love working with people in their incompleteness, their messiness and their undone-neness. But the thing is, I don’t have set these standards for them.

I set them for me.

So I am challenging myself. To leave things undone – to find peace in the questions, the unanswered, the unfinished. If we were all complete, tied up in bows, what would we learn?  

We would be unteachable, unshakable, unmovable.

Surely – nothing that is fully complete – is fully real.

I want to be authentic, real and…messy if needs be. We are all broken in our own way, but the most interesting people are the ones not afraid to admit it! And the most inspiring – are the ones that aren’t afraid to show it!

I love the metaphor in 2 Corinthians 4:7 of a cracked clay jar full of treasures. I imagine people seeing the bright jewels through the cracks in my mundane dusty clay. Without the broken, marred surface – you wouldn’t see my rich jewels. 

Our brokenness becomes our beauty.

In a world that wants us sparkling new - he takes us broken. Which is good really, because that's the only way we come.

Anna Mathur