I like processes. I like checklists. I like guarantees. I work one to two days a week for most of the year at our family’s accounting office, Treasure Valley CPA. During tax season I work five days a week. For tax season we hire extra interns and this year a receptionist to help with the increased work of end-of-the year filings and taxes. That means lots of training and teaching of processes. A couple of months ago, I discussed a brilliant idea I had with our two permanent employees. We would make lists and checklists and procedures to help with training the new employees and to have in place for future years. I have a mistaken hope that if we get expectations and procedures right, we will have only positive customer service experiences. I’ve also had this mistaken belief for much of my life about myself and in parenting. As a child, I thought that if I could wake up and not make one single mistake that day, my life would be perfect and easier. As a parent, I thought if I could find the one perfect parenting chart or program, my children would stop complaining and do all their chores and there would be no tension in our home. While there are good techniques and procedures that can help in our accounting office and with parenting, I am being taught through life experiences that there is not one way to do things, and that I will not be perfect in this life.
I don’t know how I developed my false beliefs about perfectionism, but they used to also extend to the church of Jesus Christ and the scriptures. I thought there was one perfect church plan and that the scriptures came straight from God in perfect form. I thought that God at one point had taught man the perfect way to run a church but it had become polluted over time. As I’ve been reading the accounts of the creation from Genesis and Moses and Abraham, I’ve come to understand that God reveals truth through the lens of understanding of man at that particular time.
Recently in the temple as I was participating in sealings of couples and children to parents for deceased ancestors, I noticed changes in the wording of the sealing from when I was sealed to my husband. These changes were made under the direction of modern prophets and apostles who receive on-going revelation for our time. I found myself thinking that finally, now, the wording was right. That in the past it hadn’t been correct. But then I received understanding that the words in the past were right or relevant for that time and the words now are right and relevant for our time.
I believe in a God who loves His children and communicates with us in ways we can understand and that are relevant to our day. Since we sin, since we cannot make all perfect choices all the time, and since this life is to give us experience, God offered His Only Begotten Son as a sacrifice. Jesus Christ is our Savior and through His grace, we can receive strength and comfort in our trials, we can become more than we could be on our own, and as we repent, because of Jesus Christ’s atonement, we can live with God again. Not because we are perfect but because we are perfected through Jesus Christ.