Present Over Perfect

love is.
And so I begin, feeling a little silly, feeling like so many
people I’ve criticized, inviting God to solve the problems I
could solve in my own life with better boundaries and a little
elbow grease. But I do it anyway.
Here I am, God: I feel scared and fragile, and I worry
about my kids. When I’m away from them, I miss them, but
when I’m with them sometimes I feel so impatient with them.
I don’t like who I am sometimes, and I wonder if anyone
really loves me.
And as I do it, I can feel my heart release, dropping into
the hands of God, who holds it tenderly. And I start to feel
connected and loved, even though I’m fragile, even though
I’m weak. Maybe because I am. Because I’m not frantically
trying to hide the bottle of vinegar. When I admit that it
exists, when I bring it to God in prayer and silence, that’s
when connection can begin.
He doesn’t ask me to show up and catalog my strengths.
He doesn’t ask me to show up and abuse myself for my
failings. He asks me to bring my whole-fragile-strong-weak-
good-bad self, and that starts with vinegar, and it makes a
way for oil.
This is one of those things I knew how to do as a child. I
think we all knew how, as children, to bring our whole
selves, to relationships or friendships or in prayer with God.
But along the way we learn to only bring our achievements
or our desperate apologies for the lack of achievement, as
though God is the foreman of the factory, punching our time