Present Over Perfect

all the things you’ve ever wanted—whatever success means
to you, or the good life, or what it looks like to live the
dream. Many of us have been living the life we’ve always
wanted, or so it seems. But just under the surface of that
lovely life is exhaustion, or isolation, or emptiness. It
doesn’t matter how pretty things look on the outside if on
the inside, there’s an ache from a lifetime of trying to prove
your worth.
Many of us, myself included, considered our souls
necessary collateral damage to get done the things we felt
we simply had to get done—because of other peoples’
expectations, because we want to be known as highly
capable, because we’re trying to outrun an inner emptiness.
And for a while we don’t even realize the compromise
we’ve made. We’re on autopilot, chugging through the day
on fear and caffeine, checking things off the list, falling into
bed without even a real thought or feeling or connection all
day long, just a sense of having made it through. We begin
to think the soul is expendable—a luxury, maybe,
something optional but certainly not required.
But then someone starts talking about your soul—maybe
at church, maybe in a book. Someone starts talking about
things like grace and rest and peace, and the soul feeling its
worth, and that language feels so foreign and so beautiful,
like water in a desert, like one bright bud pushing up in an
otherwise arid landscape. And like a song you used to love
but haven’t heard for years, something breaks through:
that’s what I’ve been missing. That’s it. My soul.