Perfection to be Beautiful!?!

I have barely started Karen Kingsbury's "Shades of Blue", and this sentence blew me away. This sentence made me sit back in my chair and really think, and I've now been thinking on it for a full day. "She was proof that perfection wasn't needed for life to be beautiful." Wow!!! Here I am sitting in a chair in a salon with foils in my hair, trying to obtain perfection, kidding, but it made me begin to think about my life. How often am I trying to obtain perfection and then beat myself up when I haven't arrived?

I cannot answer this for men, but I think for a lot of women we are trying to be perfect. The perfect woman with the perfect body, face, hair, perfect wife, the perfect mom with the perfectly behaved children, living in a perfectly and beautifully decorated home that is perfectly spotless. The list could go on and on in the ways that we, I try to obtain perfection. I am sad to say that I do beat myself up when I fall short of the crazy and completely unobtainable goal I have set for myself. I must stress that part...the goal I have set for myself. No one has told me I have to be perfect. I just realized somewhere I got caught up in believing all these "things" will lead to it. I began to think how much time am I wasting trying to reach my perfect goal. How much am I missing out on because I am trying to pursue that goal? In pursuing that, I think, there is a joy of living that gets lost in the path I have chosen for myself. I am missing the beauty in life, and life can be beautiful without perfection.

Ladies, whoever reads this, I no longer want to live a perfect life but a beautiful life. I want to fix my eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of my faith, our faith (Hebrews 12:2). I want to find my acceptance in Him and not of those around me. When I say those around me, I mean people I don't really know but think they have the perfect life. The truth is, we all have our "stuff" that we would change about our bodies, our homes, our whatever yours is...we all have it. I want my husband to see his wife satisfied and my children to see their mama satisfied because my joy is in Jesus and not because I am striving for some kind of perfection I can't reach. Here is to living a beautiful life...may you find beauty in the every day.
Joyfully,