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Sidewalk Birthday Prayer

May 12, 2012 by Sybil Macbeth 2 Comments Leave a Comment

Merry and I have been friends since seminary days. From the first day I met her I was a big fan. She ate artichokes, worked in a community sheltered workshop, and was a woman seminarian. She had spent a college-year studying and traveling in Europe. I wanted to be an assertive, risk-taking woman like she was.

Throughout the years of our friendship, Merry has been a mentor and a role model. She taught me to make barley rieska bread, introduced me to 12-step spirituality, and gave me one of my favorite sayings: “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” My default attitude is to never try anything I don’t think I’ll do extremely well. Merry’s adage has given me permission to try things just because they’re interesting, fun, or worthy–not necessarily because I’ll be good at them. She helped to free me from the tyranny of perfectionism.

So Merry, here’s your poor excuse for a birthday card. If you were hoping for something a little more elegant from me, you should have kept your “worth-doing” wisdom to yourself. But then you never would have gotten a card at all. xoxo

 

 

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: chalk, perfectionism, Praying in Color

Yesterday

January 9, 2011 by Sybil Macbeth 2 Comments Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I tried to write a post about Epiphany. I spent a couple of hours on it. It was boring, preachy, and full of errors. I couldn’t seem to find the words for what I wanted to say. The post was supposed to end up in the cyber-incinerator. Instead it ended up in the inboxes of subscribers. I must have pushed Publish instead of Trash. I was really surprised to find the new post in my Inbox last night– and horrified.

Except for changing the worst of the grammatical errors I’ve decided to leave the post up on the site as is. To all of my recovering perfectionist friends and myself I keep espousing, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly.” So the poorly written post stays. I’ve missed a lot of opportunities in my life to learn new skills and to embark on new adventures because I was worried about the lack of perfection in the end result. When Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect”*, he’s not telling me to do everything without flaws all of the time. I think he means, “Be whole, be healthy, grow up, and get over yourself.”

* Matthew 5:48 (NRSV)

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: Matthew 5:48, perfectionism

More Stamps

March 14, 2010 by Sybil Macbeth 1 Comment Leave a Comment

My prayer-stamp drawing exercise has been erratic. Instead of a stamp or two a day, it has been more like four stamps one day, no stamps for five days. So much for daily discipline. A daily discipline is supposed to help me with my binge-purge mentality about life. I can be so excited and grateful one day, so grumpy and despairing the next; so energetic and active one day, so lethargic the next. I want to cultivate a “This is the day the Lord has made” mentality, rather than a “perfect/imperfect” consumer evaluation of each day.

When I was a kid, I practiced radical perfectionism. For all of my elementary school years, my teachers never received a paper from me with an erasure. I wrote and rewrote my homework assignments until there there was not one corrected word or problem—no smudges, no smears, no imperfection.

I’ve made some progress in this area. So I refuse to chastise myself for an imperfect Lent. I can restart the daily discipline effort at any time.  And when I fail again, I will know that this has been a successful Lent. Lent is not about what I can do, but about what God does. A stamp a day will not keep imperfection away. I will try to remember the whole point of this season—my need and gratitude for a savior.  John Michael Talbot‘s* version of Psalm 62 sings it so well for me: ” Only in God is my soul at rest, from Him comes my salvation. He only is my rock, my strength, and my salvation.”

*John Michael Talbot,Psalm 62, Come to the Quiet, 1980

Sybil MacBeth ©2010

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Filed Under: Praying in Color Tagged With: perfectionism, Praying in Color, Psalm 62, stamps

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