Present Over Perfect

high school.
In college, I was all over the map spiritually and couldn’t
be bothered to attend chapel or church, but I took a full
class load every semester, worked in the library, and worked
at a summer camp that kept me running from morning till
night, quite literally.
All that to say, I’ve been working all my life. Work has
been a through line, one that I’m very thankful for, one that
has taught me so much about the benefits of structure,
discipline, skill, communication, and responsibility.
But at some point, good clean work became something
else: an impossible standard to meet, a frantic way of living,
a practice of ignoring my body and my spirit in order to
prove myself as the hardest of hard workers.
As I unravel the many things that brought me to this
crisis point, one is undeniably my own belief that hard work
can solve anything, that pushing through is always the right
thing, that rest and slowness are for weak people, not for
high-capacity people like me.
Oh, the things I did to my body and my spirit in order to
maintain my reputation as a high-capacity person. Oh, the
moments I missed with people I love because I was so very
committed to being known as the strongest of the strong.
Oh, the quiet moments alone with God I sacrificed in order
to cross a few things off the to-do list I worshiped.
Productivity became my idol, the thing I loved and
valued above all else. We all have these complicated tangles
of belief and identity and narrative, and one of the early