putting it all into context

I've decided this weekend I'm going to take some time and review the past year.  Somehow, I think I'm going to be encouraged. 

I've had quite a long journey in my battle with perfectionism, and this year I found some victory over it.  I remember the moment it started.  It was fourth grade.  It was some sort of creative project we had to hand in, and I was pretty proud of my finished project.  Until... this other girl in my class handed in something better.  She had gone above and beyond, she used all different types of colored pencils, she had the coolest handwriting... and man did she get praised for it.  Everybody kind of circled around her when she brought it in... I didn't like it... at all... So you can imagine me going home that day and spending hours making my handwriting look prettier, writing "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" over and over until that little writer's bump on my middle finger was pulsing.  And this became my default mode.  Whatever I did had to to be above and beyond 100%.  In fourth grade, I'd consistently stay up until midnight, making sure my work was not only right and the best, but looked pretty too.  It was exhausting, but it paid off.  My teacher started praising my work, a couple of my essay tests were the "best she's ever seen"... and you can imagine my joy when she announced that to the whole class. 

My "do better than best" attitude started to backfire around 8th grade, when we started getting papers and projects assigned to us like never before.  There just weren't enough hours in the night to keep up.  I was an 8th grade zombie, always late for school, always handing things in late, even lying about the reasons in order to get the better grade.

It's strange to look back and see how my spiritual journey coincides with this whole battle w/ perfectionism.  Fourth grade was the first time I thought about the reality of death.  I remember the first night I pictured myself in a grave, imagining how meaningless life would be if there were no heaven.  I screamed... and told my parents it was a bad dream.  By 8th grade I decided it was too crazy to believe in God, to believe in anything supernatural.  I actually wanted to, because I thought it would be nice to have some hope, but I refused to believe in it just for the sake of having hope.  I couldn't believe in something just because it made me feel better about dying.

That summer after 8th grade was a turning point.  When I was laying in bed the last day of school, I prayed to a God I didn't believe in.  I told him I felt like I was talking to the ceiling, I told him I felt foolish for even having a conversation with air, but then I begged him to make himself real, if he was there, to make himself come alive to me.  I think I was half hoping for an angel to appear in my room and say "YES he's real!", but nothing like that happened of course.  And yet, that summer, in his own way, he made himself real to me.  

So anyway, through high school and my first set of college years, I tried every way I could think of to change myself.  I failed in many different ways.  In high school, I sought help from counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists... I think I saw 4 different ones over those four years, but I was so caught up in understanding the world and asking those big metaphysical questions, that I couldn't focus on what needed to be done each day.  And I've spent too many college years jumping from one major to another, and always dropping out of classes when I wasn't meeting my own expectations. 

And all this leads to about a year ago, when I was on Christmas break.  I was feeling pretty defeated... I had dropped out of every single one of my courses in the previous semester.  Once again, my spiritual journey was suffering... even though I had trusted in God for a long time, he still felt so distant to me.  For a long time I believed that he had the power to transform me, but I had dealt with the same problem over and over again since fourth grade, and I couldn't understand why he wouldn't change me.  And so one night, I was sitting in my closet in the dark... for some reason when I'm alone in pitch black darkness, I feel like I'm most honest with myself.  Anyway, I was thinking about my whole current situation, and I started sobbing.  And I told God exactly what was on my mind.  I started asking God why he wasn't changing me. I asked him what role I was supposed to play in changing myself.  Maybe I was doing too much or too little, I wasn't sure.  I asked him why he felt so far away, if he was doing this on purpose or if I was pushing him away.  I told him how alone and helpless I felt.  And once again, I begged him to be real to me again, to come closer, to show me he's not just a God who sets things in motion, but a God who wants to be active and present in my life.  And once I had vocalized all my frustrations, I just sat there in the dark for a while.  And eventually I walked out of that closet so calm that I was smiling to myself.  It had been a while since I had been that open with God.  And even though it still felt like he was in another universe, I knew he heard me, and that's all I needed in that moment.

So within that same week, I was introduced to some materials that help you review the past year, so you can make goals for the coming year.  And as I went through those materials, I saw a startling pattern in that year.  In the times that I was consistently reading the Bible, I found victories in my personal life.  In the times that I would take a few weeks off (or more), those were my most failure-filled times.  So my goal for 2008 was to "persevere."  That was my anthem last year.  I was resolved to stay focused on the Bible and not get side-tracked for weeks at a time.  And I did pretty well.  It wasn't a night and day change, but it was a huge step forward. 

I kind of thought I was going to write about 2008 in this blog, but I've spent so much time setting the context, I better save that for another day.  If you're here, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading.  Writing kind of helps me sort out my thoughts and keep track of my journey.  On my list of favorite things, somewhere near the top, is hearing other people's stories, especially how God has changed them, how he did something in their life that they couldn't do in their own power.  It strengthens my faith, it gets me excited about the possibilities in my life and the life of my friends.  So I hope my story can help you too.