The Pressure to be Perfect

"You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Matthew 5:48

As I spend my last night in my childhood home for a while, I am reflecting on the past three months of summer and also looking forward at what the first semester of my sophomore year will bring. This summer brought along stress and times when I wanted to pull my hair out and I'm sure that this new semester will bring the same. The girls who worked for me would tell you that I strive for perfection  and when I don't get it I get angry. That is what this long, overdue blog post will be about.

I am the perfect candidate for a study on people who have Type A personalities. I am constantly stressed and am looking for ways to push myself to work harder. When I don't reach a goal in a set amount of time, I become angry and disappointed with myself. I strive to lead others around me in anything that I do. This isn't something new for me. Ever since I was young, I have always worked my hardest to get good grades and stay involved in various things, be it sports or extracurricular clubs. In high school I was involved in sports, BETA club, National Honors Society, HOSA, student government, and sports medicine.

I am not one to ask for help. I am the one who seeks out people who need help and proceed to give it to them. In first grade there was a boy who suffered from autism. Our class went on a field trip and I was right there next to him the entire time to help him and hold his hand. Getting tutoring my first semester of freshman year was a huge blow to my ego and pride. More recently I got the hotel wrong that I was supposed to go to and ended up blowing up at my mom because I wanted to cover my own mistake.

I am learning that I am not perfect and that it is ok to make mistakes as long as you learn from them. There was only one perfect person to walk the earth, and there is no way that I could ever reach that level of perfectness. God's love is unconditional. It knows no boundaries and breaks down walls that people have built up. I can mess up directions or make a bad grade, but God will still love me. He doesn't care that I'm not perfect because I was made like him.

So, in reflection of this summer, I am going to learn from my mistakes of blowing up on people when things weren't perfect or if I didn't do something right. And in contemplation of the upcoming school year, I am not going to be so hard on myself. That doesn't mean that I am not going to work hard at what I am doing to be the best, it just means that if things don't work out 100% like I want them to, I'm not going to tear myself down.