"Aim for perfection." 2 Cor. 13:11

Aim for perfection. A verse to catch the eye of anyone of the thinker/melancholy temperament. Perfection.....but I note that it doesn't say 'attain', but 'aim for'. I've been taught that a thinker's goals are set, deliberately, to where that person can't reach them. I've seen that I've done the same thing in the past. But are all of them too high? If the aim is perfection, isn't that the same thing as the goal?

Aim for perfection - so why is life so often a mess? I sometimes feel like everything I've done with my children, my friends, my emotions, is totally and completely wrong, and irrevocable. I surrender and apologize, but still continue to wade through little bits and pieces escaping everywhere.

I don't always fight it, though. I look around, dismayed, but continue to somehow avoid God while tipping acknowledgments at Him. I wonder if Paul ever avoided God. It seems unlikely. He may have said, "For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing,"* but one knows it's probably nothing as hardened as the miseries we struggle with. It would be horrendous to Paul because he was so close to Jesus - the closer one gets the more one hates the littlest sin.

So is that it? Is it because I've let things go? Would my conscience be as relentless if I was so hardened? Possibly. I might have been born with a naturally active one, the way some are born naturally more gentle than others. So, basically, it boils down to the same ol' thing......me, me, me.

I get the feeling, though, that life would be a mess no matter what my state of being.

* Rom 7:19

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