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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Faith and Values: Imperfection is OK, in golf and in living

Paul Graves

This month, I began my 51st season playing golf. One eye-rolling golf-quirk for me is the verbal tendency of golf announcers to declare a shot as “perfect.” They use perfect so, well, imperfectly.

Because the object of the goofy game is to get the ball into the hole, I think the only perfect golf shot is one that goes in the hole. A hole-in-one? Perfect! A one-inch putt that goes in the hole? Perfect! Every other shot is not really perfect. Does this make sense, even if you’re not a golfer?

So perfect is a highly overused and often misused word. This is true especially when we’re talking about our humanity. For Jesus-followers, one of the reasons seems to be our imperfect understandings of his words in Matthew 5:48: “You must be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

How can we compete with God for doing and being everything perfectly? That may actually be where we first mess up. We can’t compete with God, as hard as we try. What we also don’t realize is our English word “perfect” has so little to do with the word Jesus used.

His basis for perfection was a call for his followers to “love God with all their hearts and to serve God with all their strength.” It wasn’t about perfectionism – a moral or achievement-driven pursuit we all fall victim to. The Greek word in this passage is teleios (the adjective form of telos).

It had nothing to do with moral perfection, as we usually think. Telos means an end, a purpose, an aim, a goal. A thing is teleios if it realizes the purpose for which it is designed. A hammer is teleios when it strikes a nail perfectly, or pulls out a nail perfectly.

Likewise, a human being is teleios, perfect, if that human realizes the purpose for which he or she was created and sent out into the world. Maybe that is why John Wesley, founder of Methodism, kept preaching about “going on to perfection.” A distant goal based on a well-seen vision.

A 17-year-old teen is struggling to find what she wants to be when she grows up. All along the age spectrum, she is far from alone in that search. I knew a 90-year-old friend who just “wanted to make a difference.” Before he died, all I could tell him was what a difference he made in my life.

Imperfection is built into us, until we catch a glimpse of what our purpose, our aim, is. We’re trapped in imperfection when we set our sights way too low.

We settle for so much less than we are capable of being when we get so obsessed with our obvious imperfections. That happens every day, in so many ways, to nearly all of us.

But our obsessions blind us to the faith-given reality that we are created to be more than our negative obsessions. So I leave you with an imperfect thing to wonder about: What would a “sacrament of imperfection” look like to you?

A sacrament is meant to focus our attention on how God is present in that particular act. That act becomes sacred.

What would your imperfection begin to look like if you started to treat it as a sacred reality? If you worked to stop beating yourself up over your moral imperfections, could you begin to see the telos, the perfection, Jesus actually spoke of in his primary challenge?

Be as God means you to be. Be perfect. But continually, you always need to embrace your imperfection as sacred, so you can move on to perfection.

The Rev. Paul Graves, a Sandpoint resident and retired United Methodist minister, is the founder of Elder Advocates. He can be contacted at welhouse@nctv.com.