Every morning, as I drink coffee and wake up, I read Scripture and pray. Many mornings, I read a devotional as well.
This morning, I picked up Forty Days on Being a Three, by Sean Palmer, part of the Enneagram Daily Reflections series. Opening to Day 37, I found a meditation titled, “an Invitation to Rest.”
I almost just put it down again. Yet again, this devotional is meddling in my business and getting on my toes. But the I-will-not-quit in me kept me reading, and I’m glad I did.
Near the end, I encountered the phrase highlighted above: God pronounces creation as “good,” not perfect.
Good. Not Perfect.
I admit that when I think of Creation, I think of it as perfect before human beings messed it up. (Remember the forbidden fruit we couldn’t keeps our hands off that got us evicted?)
Being the Enneagram 3 that I am, I hot-footed it over to an interlinear to check the Hebrew. Sure enough, the word in Genesis 1 is not ‘perfect.’
The Hebrew word is tob. (Strong’s H2896 for those of you who are geeks like me.) This versatile word can be an adjective, a noun, or an adverb, meaning good in the widest sense, beautiful, better, best, pleasant, or fine—and more.
The closest description to perfect in the list is best. Best does not mean perfect. Even the best of something may not be perfect.
So what?
So what difference does any of this make? Too often I think of perfect as the standard. Not just the goal—the standard. Anything less than perfect is not good enough. And the more you work hard to be perfect, to make something perfect, the more it stings when it’s not. And it’s usually NOT, because the world isn’t perfect.
God is, however, perfect. So I have to believe that pronouncing the world ‘good’ and not ‘perfect’ was a choice.
Why would God choose to create something good instead of perfect?
Perhaps God wanted to show us that we can make such a choice. We can choose to create good in our lives and in our world. The quest for perfection often paralyzes us. We create nothing for fear of not creating perfection.
What good have I failed to bring into this world and into my life because perfectionism prevented me?
Today, in a simple sentence, in a devotional that stomps my toes far more than I would like, I am reminded: Perfect wasn’t the goal when God created. Why should it be mine when I create something?