Auditions

My daughter has been through a grueling audition process for graduate school. She is a classical musician, which stress-wise is sort of like choosing to be an air-traffic controller where everyone watches her land the plane successfully then critiques her perfection. Splitting the hairs of perfection is the marketable imprisonment of a free market. It’s also the tyrannical decisions handed down from a not-so-free market, and it seems we spend most of our network time listening to pundits arguing for the  necessity of the prison of our own choosing, and sometimes those pundits are standing in our pulpits arguing for those distinctions we can buy under the guise of the distinction that was bought for us with the life of a Saviour. This is how we forget all about freedom, even  in a free world where God has supplied an abundance of Grace.

     Let’s split hairs for a moment between perfection and being made perfect because one is Biblical and the other is not. Perfection in and of itself is impossible and in our heads we all realize this, don’t we?  Perfection requires noise and being made perfect creates quiet and peace. Perfection is all about a relentless pursuit with delayed gratification. When this happens, then I will find peace. When I have earned enough money, raised perfect children, developed the ability to perfectly —fill in the blank—then peace with myself will be my prize at the end of the journey and oh, by the way, it will be a perfect peace.  On the off-chance it doesn’t feel perfect to me when I get there, I will simply discard it like last year’s fashion for yoga pants and the beat goes on. This pursuit requires me to believe in a God who has a bucket full of Grace that He could pour at any moment He deems me worthy of it based on my performance and it would be like taking a bath in a mudless Mississippi river. This makes perfect sense if salvation is based on the model of Henry Ford.
     John Piper says it like this, to paraphrase…Piper says that to market religion to a free market society we must promote  the power to escape from weakness through leisure, but that the Biblical truth is we must seek the power to endure weakness in love.
    This is what God spoke to the Apostle Paul: But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you,  for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weakness, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.–2 Cor. 12:9.
    Today I rejoice in missed measures, in burned steak, in all the unfinished cross-stitch projects, in my messy closet, in the race I run with injury, in my less-than-perfect testimony, and I rejoice in my hastily uttered and random prayer language. I rejoice in the mud of the river which clouds my vision to the bottom, a mud which Christ will take and turn into the balm for blind eyes.
    We spend so much time perfecting ourselves instead of giving to God the reality of our weaknesses when He is the only one who can create order out of the chaos and beauty from the ruins. Perfection seems like an acceptable sin, but the price is dangerously high. The price is peace.
-submitted by Kerri Snell