The more I, as a clergymen, have dealt with people's problems and the more I have looked at my own life honestly, the more convinced I am that a lot of misery can be traced to one mistaken motion : we need to be perfect for people to love us.
Nothing can make us feel worse about ourselves than the conviction that we don't deserve to be loved. And nothing will generate that conviction more certainly than the idea that when we do something wrong, we give God and the people closet to us reasons not to love us.
We may have gotten this messages perfection from parents who genuinely love us and demonstrated that by correcting our every trivial mistakes and by constantly urging us to do better. We may have gotten this messages, from teachers who praised only perfect papers and showed impatience when we did something wrong. I once observed a class of seven year old taught by so called into two teams and gave each child a letter of the alphabet. She's called out a word, and if it included your letter, you had to race to the front of the room to help spell the word. Your team got points for completing the word first and lost points for every missing or extra letter.
In half an hour I saw several children sharpen their spelling skills, and several others absorb the lessons that they were slow and stupid and had cost their team points. The disapproval was clear in the teachers voice. I left wondering whether it was worth it or not.
YOU ARE READING
You Don't have to be Perfect
Non-FictionThis story want to persue that being individual without anything that others have is not the basis for you to give up, or simply say that you need to cope-up in any problems that passing in your way. You don't need to be perfect for people to love u...
