I just had a time of worship, at 2 in the morning, singing to Jesus about whatever came to my mind. Don't worry, I'm going back to bed. I have a cold, and in the middle of vibrant dreams, my stuffiness woke me up. I'd love to be done with this quickly, so I'm gonna juice some carrots and get back to bed, hoping for another two hours of sleep before I have to go to work. But as I'm sitting here praising and offering my services, insignificant as they might be, that remark of Dawna's comes back to me and I want to say something about it.
We are not called simply to Excellence, but to Perfection. Excellence can be accomplished by human effort. I know excellent people, lots of them, and in common they possess certain traits, not the least of which is commitment.
What's tickling my mind right now is that Excellence is the outer limit of human effort. We must push towards excellence, believing that at the edge of our finest efforts, we'll be met by Grace, which bridges the gap into a fairer land, Perfection. We cannot build perfection, we can build excellence, a rhythm of disciplines, a commitment to believing and becoming. We can practice scales and we can sing together and seek the deep wisdom of the dance. There is much we can do.
The word did not say, "be ye therefore pretty good."
Nor did it say "Be ye therefore great at some things, average at others, and sucky at some."
It says, "Be ye therefore Perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is Perfect."
That cannot be accomplished by human engineering. And we can get lost in the semantics of what it means to be Perfect. Maybe it doesn't really mean perfect. Maybe it only means to be mature and fully-fashioned. OK, by whatever measure we approach the word, it remains we cannot be this thing to which we are called without the intervention of the Master craftsman.
And this is the good news. Put in the work. Practice those scales. Learn those harmonies. Sing them again. Now another time. Push when you're tired. Learn it the right way. Don't learn the tricks of the trade--learn the trade. At the end, as in the middle, Perfection will be His addition of Grace to our offering of Excellence.
I'm gonna take some juice and go back to bed.
Goodnight, Beautiful...
Goodnight Strender
Maybe he wants us to be perfectly happy at whatever it is we're doing. To be lost in the doing of, in the moment, to know nothing else but the beauty of the note, the scale, the song, brushing our teeth, being nice to the neighbor, singing his praise. Maybe it's being satisfied that we've run the good race, with heart, and meaning, and joy...
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