A Place For The Limitless

Is there anything perfect in this world? Anything whole, pure, and without flaw? Faces wrinkle. Health declines. Love runs cold. Power corrupts. Virtue surrenders to vice. Even the best people we know eventually let us down. 

But what about God? God is perfect. 

Think about it. . . There is nothing to fix about Him. No darkness found in Him. Not one indecency surrounding Him. We will never one day discover manipulation or injustice in His past. He will never break a promise, be fake, or turn cold. We could spend all our days searching His character and we’d only find light. 

How foreign is this to us?! It’s impossible to even wrap our minds around Him because we have never encountered anyone here on earth that we can say the same about. 

But knowing God is knowing perfection. His works? Faultless. His ways? Always right. His Word? Flawless. His promises? Proven true. His understanding and knowledge? Limitless. 

We just want to be good, right? Good enough. So we try to pull up from inside ourselves some little piece of love and light. And on good days, we do find some tiny but indelible thumbprints of our Creator. And we grasp at that, hold it, pull on it, attempting to stretch the good wider and wider until it covers every bit of us. But we can never quite get enough of it or keep hold of it long enough. And it feels like any momentary good deeds, altruistic thoughts, and heart-felt virtues can be overshadowed by our many imperfections. 

But God doesn’t have to TRY or STRIVE, sweat, and strain. He doesn’t have to choose the good or weigh and worry about where His heart is leaning or wonder whether his motives are honorable. This kind of battle is constantly ours, but it has never been His. He puts no effort into reaching perfection, because HE HIMSELF IS perfection. It is who He is. It’s his DNA. It’s the only thing He’s ever known — right, good, best. He has never made a mistake, and He never will. In fact, the word “oops” will never come out of his mouth. Never will He unintentionally hurt or intentionally wrong another. 

How incredibly and wonderfully different than we are. 

We are: 

guided by greedy motives; 

marked by desperate actions; 

full of ugly words and twisted thoughts; 

united in unhealthy relationships; 

living in contaminated communities; 

swimming in an evil world. 

We can: 

read every self-help book; 

practice every discipline imaginable;

build a hedge and hide in solitude; 

or surround ourselves with the wisest companions. 

But it does not work. Under the brightest light of examination, cracks remain. And the truth of our condition bellows. And we just don’t know what to do with that. But God did. He knew what to do with our constant imperfections and failings. He put on flesh. That’s right, our Limitless Lord took a place among us. And, in the center of that mind-blowing paradox, we find our answer and our peace. 

So let’s move past any and all disappointment and discontentment with our own imperfections, and rejoice instead that The Perfect One has willingly drawn near to the Imperfect Ones. Let’s choose to gratefully receive what His coming has made available to us — a chance to break free and rise above this limited and imperfect world, an opportunity to be ushered into the Kingdom of a Perfect King. May we cling fast to our citizenship and drink fully of all the light and right he pours out on us.