O Lord, my God, our God, I am overcome.  I rise this morning overcome with your beauty, your majesty, your absolute perfection.  All these years I have tried to overcome my perfectionism and suddenly, instantly, I am embracing.  Because you have caused me to realize that my longing for perfect is really my longing for you!

Yes, I long for perfect.  I long for a perfect world with no fear and no hurting.  You are perfect love.  You cast out all fear.  I long for a perfect world with no ugly and only beauty.  You are perfectly beautiful.  I long for perfect relationships where I understand perfectly and I am perfectly understood, where I love perfectly and I am perfectly loved.  You love perfectly.  All you think, all you feel, all you do is grounded in love because you ARE the essence of love.  And you are helping me, day by day, to love you more and more.  I long for the day I can love you perfectly and I trust I will get there because you have promised to bring me to perfect completion.

O Lord, my God, our God, I am overcome.

Everywhere I look, I see you spreading perfect love.  In the summer moon rising orange and full over Lake Michigan, I saw you last night.  In the glowing embers and campfire flames on our farm, under the starry sky with Big Dipper pouring  your abundant blessings, I saw you last night.  In my teenage son, sending up bottle rockets, one after the other, because he can, I saw you last night.  In the sparklers we held dazzling in our hands, I saw you last night.  In the young woman sitting at our campfire, now planning a wedding with a man after your heart when just months ago she questioned if she was lovable—if she was beautiful—I saw you last night.  In another young woman you led to table with me—a woman I’ve known through horses and I saw the hunger in her eyes for holy.  I saw you in her eyes last night.

And even before last night, in the same day, I stepped outside and surveyed my gardens and walked the trails and saw your perfection.  Hundreds of different flowers—vegetables and fruit now ripening—graceful  horses grazing—gentle roll of the land and breezy sway of the grasses—birds of the air floating and swooping elegance—eight-point buck running right in front of me with white tail flagging—doe and her fawns following—yellow lab loping through fields chasing a rabbit—pastor’s wife sharing heart and how you brought us together at such a time when we needed each other but didn’t yet know each other and you helped us both through each other—azure sky we walked under with white cream clouds you spread feathering—husband working on the fence line who loves me true and who I love truly and it will be 20 years now in a few weeks, in Alaska, celebrating—children from Russia you placed in our arms who are too big to hold now except in our hearts and all the hard times I thought would crush me dead but didn’t because you are perfectly faithful—all the true friends who have held up our heads with your love in flesh hands and hearts . . .

For imperfect run-on sentences that I don’t care about right now because all I want to do is write and write and write about how PERFECT you are and not worry about perfect sentence structure!  And I want to shout to the world . . .

“If you want perfect—look around and see God!”

Lord, keep giving me eyes to see, hands to feel, tongue to taste, ears to hear, nose to smell your glory, every day.  Help me remember that your kingdom is here too, not just a future hope.  You, the perfect, are here in the still imperfect world.  And we can know you because you want to be known.  And you want us to know that you know us deeper than we know ourselves and you love us perfectly, even in our imperfection.  And you’ve done something about our imperfect state.  You gave who you love most to make us perfect once again.  And you’re bringing us back—back to perfection, day-by-day, every day we follow you and don’t turn away.  You’re bringing us home.

Thank you for giving me my longing for perfection.  Thank you for helping me turn perfectionism in the right direction—not trying to be that which I can never be on my own but turning me to see you, immersing myself in you, perfect you, and adoring the one on whom I want to gaze forever.  I am perfectly content in your presence because . . .

You are perfect . . .

Simply, beautifully, gloriously, perfect.