Perfectionism/Legalism

Read this article about marriage and how marriages survive (or don't) in super-controlling/cultic church cultures.

---

It's easier to live in a world governed by rules and regulations. Then you know when you are pleasing God--and the pleasing of God is dependent on you and your performance.

It's easier to live in that world when we are so performance-oriented.

But that's not what grace is. Grace is what happens when our efforts, our moods, our feelings, our self-motivated self-salvation efforts are subordinated by the supremacy of Christ and his death and resurrection.

AND I am so good at reciting these definitions, but my life reveals that I don't live it. I'm no perfectionist (that much is made obvious, at least to me, because I'm married to a perfectionist), but I want my own status to be dependent on me just as much as the best of y'all perfectionists might!

---

I have a cheat sheet that lists The Four Pairs of Preferences from the Myers-Briggs Temperament Sorter. Here are some words that I feel describe me:

I want sociability, interaction, multiplicity of relationships, and external happenings.
I work from hunches; depend on inspiration; like fantasy, the fantastic, fiction, and imaginative.
I think based on values, extenuating circimstances, intimacy, humane choices, harmony, sympathy, and feelings.
I judge as I go and adapt as I go, let life happen, believe that something will turn up and that there's plenty of time, and I wait and see.

Most of the time I like these things about myself. But one thing you perfectionists don't get is that it's stressful, when deadlines and due dates come, to live loosey-goosey like this.

But there's still grace, even for a non-perfectionist like me. And I need the people who love me to keep reminding me of this--and that only by grace will I succeed.