Have you ever put so much pressure on yourself that what you do can never be good enough? Have you ever set the expectation bar so high that you set yourself up for failure? Have you ever set perfection as the goal, to the extent that its easier not to even start because your scared you won’t succeed?
Just me?
I’ve got a piece of work to do and the deadline is fast approaching. I need to write a couple of sides of A4 for someone I’ve never met as a kind of introduction. I don’t want to give a bad impression before they’ve even met me! And it’s for something that is important to me, something that I’ve given a lot of time in prayer to, so I really, really don’t want to screw it up. So I have started writing, read it back and deleted it. And repeated. Multiple times…
Except that’s not the point, is it? To get it perfect? I’ve written before about perfection. However, it isn’t aiming for perfection that is causing me to stumble, it’s fear of messing it up. But God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear (also written about that recently).
I can think of someone in the bible who was held back by fear (amongst other things).
Moses was a miracle child. By rights, he should have been killed at birth because that is what Pharaoah had decreed: all Hebrew boys were to be killed so the Hebrew slaves wouldn’t overthrow the Egyptians. But Moses was hidden in plain sight. He was left in the Nile and found by Pharaoah’s daughter, then raised in the Palace as royalty. As a young man, he stood up for his people. He saw a slave being mistreated and confronted the Egyptian guard, killing him. He got it a bit wrong…
Moses then had to run for his life. He fled to the desert, where he met Jethro and married his daughter. Years later, while he is moving Jethro’s flock, he stumbles across a burning bush. God uses that bush to get Moses’ attention, then tells him to go back to Egypt to save the Hebrews, the task that he was saved for.
Big pressure! Big expectations! And Moses got it wrong before. So instead of looking at the burning bush that wasn’t burning up, or trusting the voice of God, or the subsequent miracles that God shows him, Moses sees the pressure, the opportunity to fail (again) and makes excuse after excuse about why he can’t go back, why God should choose someone else. Because if Moses fails, the consequences don’t bear thinking about! Maybe it was a fear of failure, a fear of messing up, that made Moses ignore what was right in front of him and instead hesitate.
But God doesn’t set us up for failure. And although it took a while, Moses did succeed. Or, more accurately, God succeeded, using Moses as his mouthpiece. Because essentially that is what Moses did. He passed in messages and warnings from God to Pharaoah. And God made sure no harm came to Moses.
OK, my writers block is very much less serious. No one gets hurt if I mess this up. But there is a lesson in Moses’ story, for all of us. Moses messed up as a young man. He was supposed to save the Hebrews and instead ended up fleeing for his life. His timing was off, or he went about it in the wrong way. But that mistake did not derail God’s plan. His mistake in the past did not dictate how his future would pan out. It wasn’t a case of one (very) bad choice and God could no longer use him. And if God can still use Moses after a serious mistake like that, he can still use us even after the mistakes that we make.
So fear of messing up (again) shouldn’t be enough to cause us to freeze. Or stop us from trying. And instead of hitting a brick wall (or writers block in my case), what we really need to do is stop and remember what it’s for. And who it’s for. God finds a way, despite our mistakes. It’s not really up to us. God loves people who make mistakes, he doesn’t count them out. So tomorrow I’m going to try again. I’m going to lower the bar and remember that a little rough around the edges is OK. I’m going to choose to trust that God will do his bit if I do mine. And I’m going to remember that God’s love for me doesn’t end if I don’t achieve perfection.
The Reason for my Hope Blog 