Less Than Perfect

A Giving and Receiving Post

I have a sister who bakes and decorates amazing cakes. My children often teasingly ask me why they never get birthday cakes like the ones their cousins get. Occasionally I’ve attempted to make excuses about time or the right tools, but the real reason is simply that I’ve never cared enough to learn how. I don’t particularly like cakes or baking itself; add in the thought of learning to decorate something I don’t even want to eat and I’m ready to throw in the towel before I’ve begun!

So while my sister’s cakes look more like this:

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Mine tend to look something like this:

Photo by Romario Roges on Unsplash

I love my children and so I make the cake to the best of my ability, but the offering is so far from perfect as to be laughable, and we all just have to hope that it tastes better than it looks.

---

I’ve done a lot of reflecting over the past few months about what it means to offer oneself to God. I tend to romanticize the idea and the phrase “self offering” conjures images of heroic martyrdom and ultimate sacrifice. Usually one good look in the soul-mirror that is family life is enough to shake me out of the delusion that I am capable of such feats but the desire for them remains.

Heroes like St. George, St. Dimitrius, St. Marina, St. Sophia, St. Barbara, St. Katherine; I long to be like them. I imagine myself in their place and (foolishly) conclude that if it were me, I would be heroic too. It’s interesting to me, the way I am capable of fooling myself into thinking that I’m better than I really am — that my offering looks like a magazine-worthy cake rather than a mess of ingredients carelessly slapped together.

Sometimes I try to justify my lack and catalog all the reasons why I am not perfect, as though having an excuse will make things better. I think we all do this to some degree. Other times we hasten to point out the perfection isn’t even possible in this life anyway and we try to convince ourselves that effort or intent are the most important things. After all, it’s the thought that counts, right? (Except when it doesn’t; when that thought never gets translated into action or when the effort is aimed toward the wrong goal, what is there to count? But I suppose those are questions for another day.)

Today what I’m noticing is simply this: my actual self falls short of my ideal self. Sometimes that’s my fault, other times it’s not, but all potential causes aside, the reality is that I don’t usually notice the discrepancy. Another reality is that the discrepancy never resolves itself, whether I’m seeing it or not.

There is still another reality that I also overlook. This is the reality of Romans 5:8, “…while we were yet sinners Christ died for us”. Not sinners in the abstract, like we think when we hide our faces from reality, but sinners in the concrete actual spaces we inhabit and the relationships we have; sinners who work oh-so-hard to attain perfection and yet simultaneously excuse and justify imperfections, either pretending that they are actually strengths, or simply ignoring them altogether.

To use the cake metaphor, our offerings are on the level of mudpies, while we try to convince ourselves that they are awe-inspiring cakes, fit for high-end weddings.

And yet, our offerings are accepted and we find our talents increased by the very act of that offering, with the gift not only being accepted, but then returned to us in the dance of hospitality, such that our loaves (or should I stick with cakes?) have been multiplied on an astounding scale.

We find ourselves faced with a paradox: all our efforts to offer/attain perfection only ever produce imperfections, and yet that very imperfection is what is accepted, transformed, and re-presented back to us in a state far more prefect than we could ever have achieved ourselves.

Even if we break this cycle of hospitality the gifts of which we are the recipients don’t stop, exactly, but there is certainly a difference between talents increased and talents buried in the ground.

For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.

Luke 12:48

We have been entrusted with so much — with our lives, our families, with all that we have — and all we can do is to offer it back to the Lord, Who will increase it and multiply it and give it back to us enriched with His grace so that we can begin again.

Further up and further in.