The Gifts of Imperfection: Letting Go Of Self Judgment by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Kurt Young)

When I was in seminary I decided to take up weaving. I was spending lots of time using my brain, studying, thinking hard. I needed to do something creative. There was an arts center just down the road from the seminary and I thought it would be fun to learn to weave. So I signed up for a class. I found it really relaxing because it was different from everything else I was doing in my life.

I tried to find my first weaving so I could show you. It was a sampler, a practice piece where we tried lots of different weaving types. One of the hardest things for a new weaver to do is to get the edges, called the salvages, even. You can always tell a beginner because, for example, a scarf might go from being 5 inches wide to 6 to 7 and back to 5. Not good. My selvages were a mess on my sampler, but my teacher taught me not to worry. There is no such thing as a perfectly woven piece of fabric. The imperfections tell you it is hand-woven. I can look at a piece of cloth and tell you if it is hand-woven or machine woven as the hand woven ones have imperfections. I love the imperfections of a hand woven scarf or shawl any day. 

I learned in weaving class to let go do judgment and comparisons. Weaving is not a competitive sport. It is about being creative and having some fun. It’s about weaving something beautiful for yourself or someone you love. When I graduated from seminary, my church gave me a loom as a gift. So I kept weaving for a few years. But then I got married and had two kids and I did not make time in my life for weaving.  And now the loom is an interesting conversation piece in our home.

Brene Brown tells a story in her book about The Gifts of Imperfection. She says that she remembers a time in her childhood when her life changed. Her family lived in New Orleans when her father was a law student. They lived in a funky little apartment near Tulane University. They would go to the market in the French Quarter. She and her mother would bake and do creative things. They would do creative arts projects. They wore bell bottoms and had fun. Then her dad graduated from law school. He took a job and they moved to the suburbs in Houston. She says she remembers thinking that everyone’s living room looked like the lobby of a Holiday Inn. They were all pretty much the same. This is how she describes it: “Things changed and in many ways that move felt like a fundamental shift for our family. My parents were launched on the accomplishment-and-acquisitions track and creativity gave way… to comparison” ( p 94). “Comparison” she writes, “is all about conformity and competition” (ibid).

When we are caught up in comparison with other people we lose all sense of joy and happiness. Comparison in hard. We can never live up to the person we are comparing ourselves to. There will always be someone who seems to be better, smarter, faster, prettier, stronger, or more successful, in some way.

Dr. Brown says, that one way to whole hearted living, is to let go of this need for comparison. One tool we can use for doing this, regain a sense of joy, is to reclaim our creativity. We need to once, again, as I said last week, be like children: be vulnerable, dance, draw, cook, plant seeds, finger paint, play with play-doh, build a snow creation, sew, knit, make a model plane, work with wood, build a house, write a poem, or a song. Do you get the idea? 

But, with no judgment. Hear that NO JUDGEMENT.  So, we have to leave that old life of judgment behind, that life of comparison and thinking we are not good enough. It does not work for us. 

The Apostle Paul knew something about that life of judgment and comparison. He called it a life of sin. Sin takes many forms. Sometimes it means we pick up bad habits. Paul refers to the practice of letting the world tell us how to live. The world wants to tell us how to live, doesn’t it?  The world will tell us to live with shame, and to judge ourselves. The world will tell us to get caught up in the race to acquire more stuff and compete with our neighbors and our co-workers. 

We give in to this need to look better, to sell more, and to buy the best stuff. We must be perfect because being perfect will keep us from feeling any pain and we want to avoid pain at any cost. Remember those numbing agents we talked about last week.  And we sure don’t want to look bad. 

But when Paul is writing to the early Christians in Ephesus, he applauds them for leaving their life of sin behind. He says that God takes our sin dead lives and makes us alive in Christ. He writes:

Saving is all God’s idea, and all God’s work. All we do is trust enough to let God do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish!

It’s like this: If we trust God, God can save us from all this judgment. Salvation from all of these expectations is God’s gift to us. 

Jesus had something to say about this too. He said: ³⁷ “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; ³⁸ give, and it will be given to you. (Luke 6)”.  Isn’t that nice?  We could love by just this and live very well.  Now he was probably telling people here, not to judge or condemn others, but it follows that he would not want us to judge or condemn ourselves, because he also said we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. 

Jesus was simply not into this judgment and shame way of living. His way was the way of forgiveness and grace.   Forgiveness and grace aren’t those great.  Don’t you wish you could take a shower like that every morning.  Not a shower of shame, but a starting over grace.

American journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen once said: “The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself” (quoted in The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown, p. 55). 

You see, God wants us to be ourselves – the person God put us on this earth to be. God does not want us to live striving to be someone we are not – some unrealistic image of some superhuman model of perfection. 

When we strive for perfection, we end up failing and then we fall into shame. Shame is a bad place to live. So, the alternative choice is to see the flaws in the fabric of our lives as gifts. The cracks in our pots are signs that we are human and human beings have good days and bad, ups and down. 

Now just to clarify, perfectionism, is not the same as wanting to do our best. It’s not about seeking excellence. Those are good values. Perfectionism is the 10 ton weight that paralyzes us. 

Perfectionism is also not about self-improvement. A little healthy self-improvement never hurt anyone. But perfectionists take it too far. We learn this from an early age. We are raised as over-achievers, being praised for good grades, being good at sports, having good manners and the like. But somewhere along the way it becomes “debilitating” (p. 56). We become what we do. Healthy growth is focused on one’s own goals: what do I want to do to improve at something? Perfectionism is other-focused: what will they think of me?  Healthy living is what do I want to do. 

Dr. Brown thinks that we all practice perfectionism to some degree. It is on a sort of continuum with some of being very caught up on perfectionism and others of us not so much.  We are all somewhere along the continuum.  

A way to overcome perfectionism is to embrace compassion and to be more loving toward ourselves. I love this because one of our core values here at The Village is compassion. We usually talk about showing compassion for people who are poor and living on the margins. But it would not be a stretch for us to decide to extend this compassion back toward ourselves. 

Remember, Jesus said, that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbor as yourselves. These three are intertwined. We love God by loving ourselves and our neighbor.

But you see, we cannot practice self-love and self-compassion, when we are killing ourselves with the unrealistic expectations of perfectionism. The two things they just do not fit together. 

So, the challenge, invitation for us, is to allow ourselves to be imperfect. There are no perfect people, just people trying to be perfect. Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” has a line in it: “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” Can we celebrate the cracks in our lives? The imperfections. Because those are the places where the light of God can come in and heal us and love us and remind us that we can’t do everything. We can’t possibly take care of everything or be enough. But it’s ok because God loves us and God will walk with us through the hard times. And God will bring joy back around to us.  Joy always comes back around.

So I want to take you back to my story of learning to weave. I told you that during this series about the “Gifts of Imperfection” we would learn some practices to cultivate what Dr. Brown calls “whole-hearted living.” In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, which I recommend to you, in each chapter, she has suggestions for ways we can let go of who we think we are supposed to be, or who we think the world is pushing us to be, and embrace who we are. I would add that we can embrace being the person that God put us on this earth to be. In the chapter on “Letting Go of Comparison” she encourages us to practice creativity.

I think when I was in seminary, which is graduate school, and can be a highly competitive environment full of opportunities to compare one’s self to other students, I needed a place to be creative in non-judgmental space. So I found my way to the arts center and the weaving studio. My teacher there taught me not to worry about the imperfections in my weaving but to just work with them and have fun creating. 

I did not have to produce when I was weaving, I was just creating beauty for the sake of beauty. It was for me, but I did not have to do it. I am making a promise to myself that soon I’m going to dust off my loom and use it again. I need to do something creative and practice something without judgment. 

So I wonder, what can you do to get your creative juices going, and to practice letting go of comparison and judgment? Can you draw, cook, plant (inside right now if you want it to live), work with wood, write, sew, doodle, landscape, build, paint, sing or dance? 

We put some crayons on the tables in worship.  You can do it at home right now, even if it’s just pen or pencil.  I want to give you a few minutes to doodle and ask God how you can be creative and do something in the coming weeks that will allow you to be more like a child, and have fun, without judgment of yourself.  As people in our worship celebration decided, it can even be gathering shells on a beach (as another 2-6 inches of snow fell into our soon to be record winter), writing or singing a song, and some great pictures were created.  

Do you have somewhere to be imperfect like this?  At the Village, the only people not welcomed would be perfect people.  Then again, no human is perfect so everyone is welcome.  Come join us if you’re near the corner of The Anthony Wayne Trail and Conant Street in the Maumee Indoor Theater. We’re there Sundays at 10:30 AM and out in the world the rest of the week.