You don't have to be perfect to be amazing! According to the Apostle Paul, we are God's masterpieces, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which he prepared in advance that we might walk in them! Ephesians 2:10. God does not make mistakes! And if you are his workmanship, you must be pretty awesome!
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| "You Don't Have to be Perfect to be Amazing!" |
Forgive Yourself!
Don't try to have a
higher standard for yourself than God does. He has made forgiveness
easy, so don't you try to make it difficult. Forgive yourself!
If you have harmed someone else, then apologize for what you have done. Don't focus on what the other person did. Just acknowledge what you did or failed to do. If there is something that can be reasonably done to right the wrong, then do it. The key word is "reasonable," which can be tough to determine when you are one of the parties involved in a conflict. Ask a neutral third party whose judgement you trust what you think you should do. Pray about it. And once you have a genuine conviction about what you should do to make amends, then do it.
If you have harmed someone else, then apologize for what you have done. Don't focus on what the other person did. Just acknowledge what you did or failed to do. If there is something that can be reasonably done to right the wrong, then do it. The key word is "reasonable," which can be tough to determine when you are one of the parties involved in a conflict. Ask a neutral third party whose judgement you trust what you think you should do. Pray about it. And once you have a genuine conviction about what you should do to make amends, then do it.
And once you have apologized and taken reasonable steps to make amends, then move on with your life! Forgive yourself! Just like you would forgive someone you love dearly, like your child or your best friend.
Jesus said that you should love your neighbor as yourself. Interestingly, for many people, the stumbling block here is loving themselves! And if you don't love yourself -- if you instead have hatred and contempt for yourself and criticize yourself constantly -- what kind of love can you possibly offer anyone else? If you have mostly negative feelings towards yourself, then you will more likely hate your neighbor like you hate yourself, rather than loving them!
Change Your Perspective about the Past!
If you are looking back over your past and you feel like you've had more failures than successes, more regrets than good memories, and more sorrow than joy, you've got to change your relationship with your past. The past is over and done with. You can't go back and change it now. But you can change how you think about it.
Here's something you can try: look at your life as it is right now and find some things to be grateful for. You may not feel like it, but it's the only way to change your negative habits of mind. Maybe you have trained yourself to look for the bad in each situation, so that you expect things to be bad and to only get worse. That habit of mind won't change on its own. You have to conscientiously make a point, each day, of looking for things you can be grateful for.
Start a gratitude journal! Every morning, as soon as you wake up (or maybe after you've poured yourself a cup of coffee to drink while you do this), write down three things you are grateful for. And don't just do this mechanically. As you write each one down, stop and think about it for a minute. Savor it, if you can. Imagine what it would feel like to lose it, and then imagine how overjoyed you would feel if, after losing it, you found it again! By doing this, you can increase your appreciation for what you already have, and stop beating yourself over what you don't have; and you can become happy to be who you are, where you are, with the life you're actually living, rather than some idealized vision of how things could have turned out if you had taken a different path -- a vision which is almost certainly unrealistic and leaves out a lot of the difficulties you would have faced if you actually had taken that different path. Instead of ruminating over what you think went wrong, express gratitude for what has gone well!
Have an attitude of gratitude! Give thanks to God for what you actually have -- especially your relationships with God and with others -- and thank God for the life you are actually living!
Here's another thing you can do: make peace with your past. It is what it is, but it's not who you are; and it's definitely not who you're destined to become. As 1 John 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us of all unrighteousness." Take God at his word and receive his forgiveness.
If you feel discouraged, pause for a minute, turn your attention towards that feeling, and examine it in a dispassionate, open-hearted, and curious way: examine it like you would examine a piece of cloth or something equally impersonal. Pay attention to the physical sensations associated with the feeling. Where do you feel it? Become aware of it, not as a judgment about you or your life, but merely as a pattern of energy in your body. In doing this, you may discover something ironic: as you become willing to feel this sensation and pay attention to it more closely, rather than trying to fight or suppress it, you will find (with enough practice) that the emotion loses energy and dissipates on its own.
Remember this: a feeling is not a fact, even if it purports to be. Maybe a feeling of sadness feels like a compelling judgment that your life is bad, but it is not. Practice the technique of "reframing" -- which is where you change your perspective on something by shifting your frame of reference; sometimes this is also called "paradigm shifting." Here's an example: let's say the traffic is unexpectedly bad and you are running late for an important meeting. One perspective would be to focus only on the inconvenience of being late, the feeling of pressure to arrive on time, or the anticipation of being embarrassed to arrive after the meeting has already started. If you make that your focus, your mood will be negative. Instead, try thinking about how you would have felt if, instead of simply running late because of bad traffic, you had experienced a breakdown and you had to wait on the side of the road for a tow truck -- that would surely be so much worse than just being a little late because of traffic: focus on what a blessing it is to have a car that is working the way it should! You may be late, but at least you're moving towards your destination! And then think, how bad is this really going to be? Probably not nearly as bad as you imagine! And will it really matter in 20 years that you arrived late today for this meeting? Probably not! By shifting your perspective, you will soon find that your negative feelings about the situation subside, even if just for a moment; but the fact that your feelings can change like that, when your circumstances have stayed the same and only your perspective has changed, shows that your feelings are not so absolutely and objectively true as they "feel."
Progress, NOT Perfection!
The reality is, as long as we are living in this world, we will always be "on the road" to somewhere else. We never arrive once and for all. And so that means we are continually making progress, which means we aren't perfect! Perfection is not the goal in this life: progress is. As the recovery-program slogan goes, "Progress, NOT perfection."
You Don't Have to be Perfect to be AMAZING!!!
You don't have to be perfect to be amazing. God already loves you and has a plan for your life. God has already forgiven you and set you free. Be free! Allow yourself to be as amazing as God wants to empower and enable you to be!
