For God Sake Stop Obsessing

Living life as a perfectionist in a soul that is imperfect is self-torture. I am a perfectionist, to a fault. There, I confess it. Perfectionism causes the perfectionist to become stunted instead of making real progress. We mark time on a project trying to perfect it by tweaking and tweaking and tweaking instead of moving on the the next. I used to think it was a really good quality, but when done in excess, it just becomes a hindrance.

Perfectionism is defined as the action or process of improving something until it is faultless or flawless. But in the perfectionist's mind, that standard is never met. In the past, it gained me a lot of success because the results are very good, but there could certainly be more success if I didn't mark time in that one spot. Forward march on to the next project! But what is the answer to the endless tweaking?

I pray that God will destroy this yoke of perfectionism binding me and pull down this stronghold. Jesus said that He gave us keys to the kingdom of heaven and whatever we bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever we loose on earth will be loosed in heaven (Matt. 6:19).

Don't torture yourself trying to be perfect. Be good at what you do, but stop obsessing. Eccl. 9:10 states, "Whatsoever your hand findeth to do, do it with your might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, where you're going." Do well in all you do, but know when enough is enough. Cut yourself some slack and know that a missing punctuation mark is not the end of the world. Stop over-analyzing everything. Stop trying to impress everybody because everybody will not be impressed no matter how hard you try.

I find that people are turned off by others they feel are so much better than themselves. One day I lost my temper at work and slammed my fist into the overhead bin of my desk in front of my coworkers. Later, a friend came back and said that she found it very liberating to see me do that because it showed that I was just as human as the rest of them. I had been kicking myself in the rear for that display of anger until I realized that it caused them to see me as just one of them. She and I became the best of friends.

We are not perfect... so let's give ourselves a break. Go in peace!