Are You Buying Into The BS of Your Own Imperfection?

So, you’re telling me God got it wrong?

Growing up in an industrial mill city here in New England we had our share of factory outlet stores. Not the fancy destination “outlet” malls with food courts we see today. Our factory outlets were an extension of the manufacturing facility where “slightly irregular” items were sold off in an effort to recoup some money on manufacturing mistakes. These imperfect items just didn’t measure up and meet the quality standards demanded by their customers.

It’s logical to expect some manufactured items would end up with some imperfections. But when it comes to people, I just don’t see God as one who makes mistakes.

I was intrigued earlier this week overhearing a conversation about imperfections. The premise surmised personal imperfections are just something we need to embrace. Not to just accept them; rather, we should embrace them. Apparently embracing our flaws and imperfections is an act of self-acceptance which allows us to love ourselves for who it is we think we really are, even if we think we are broken and incomplete.

Self acceptance is a life-changing paradigm. How it changes, though, depends upon what it is you are willing to accept about yourself.

Divine Intelligence, the Source of all, is a perfection creation machine.  I don’t see God stepping back, scratching Her head and saying “Oops…I got that one wrong”.  There is no factory outlet where She puts her imperfectly-created humans on the shelf.

Learning to embrace your imperfections requires you to first acknowledge you are imperfect, slightly irregular, somewhat defective, not quite good enough. That doesn’t sound like the quality work God is known for. Embracing your imperfections acknowledges you believe your Creator got something wrong when it came to your own creation.

Bullshit.

Imperfection is a mindset we may be willing to accept. We gather the lies we’ve been told about who we are, combine them with the undesired experiences and outcomes we’ve all lived through and neatly package them into what we call imperfections. We tell ourselves we are flawed and in a distorted act of self compassion we coddle ourselves, heroically coming to our own rescue, somehow finding a glimmer of peace in knowing we’re OK with who we think we are, self-imposed limitations and all.

We all have things we want to improve upon in our lives. God knows I do. We all want to grow and become the best version of our self we can be. But just because we are not yet the person we aspire to become doesn’t mean we are defective!

Our creation is one of purity and perfection. Then life happens. The highly competitive world in which we live thrives and profits from our collective insecurities and perceived shortcomings, reinforcing the spiritually-misguided concept of our own imperfection and flaws.

When we look at our existence through God’s eyes, the only flaw we have is our willingness to accept we are flawed in the first place.

It’s a great day to be you!