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| No, not really my perfect pizza! |
If there’s one thing about me that is consistently true, it’s that I don’t really care about food in the normal way. Yes, I eat, but as long as it’s edible, reasonably healthy, won’t hurt my stomach, and isn’t one of the few foods I detest, I’ll eat and be happy. Of course, it figures that I’d marry a man who does care about his food. Not only does he care that it tastes good (imo no one cooks as good as he does) but he also cares what it looks like- enough that I’ve taken pictures of his plated food because it is so visually appealing. So it was, early in our marriage we were forming our own pizzas. He had cut up the toppings, and I decided to wow him by taking a lot of time to make mine look beautifully perfect.
The smell from the hot oven was amazing when my pizza finished cooking. Donning my oven gloves, I carefully pulled the cookie sheet out and gazed at the most perfect looking food I had ever made. I was so proud and so excited that it turned out so well. As I walked toward the dining room I was anticipating the wonderful flavours and how much I would enjoy it when suddenly I stumbled, the cookie sheet snapped up, and my beautifully perfect pizza made a beautifully perfect 2 ½ turn summersault and landed, upside down, in an open, brown paper grocery bag, still half full of groceries, that I’d left on the floor.
There are so many parallels I can make with this story from my life, but actually I want to write about a problem I have- with perfection. Usually, if I don’t think I can do something perfectly, I don’t bother trying, and that’s been a struggle for me to overcome for years. Imagine the things that don’t get done with that poor attitude: dishes, cleaning, studying, and cooking, really everything. It was just this Sunday I was thinking more on how this attitude keeps me in bondage in my maturing in the Lord. Fear. That’s what it is.
For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. 2Tm. 1:7
…be ye tranformed by the renewing of your mind… Rom. 12:2
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Jh. 8:32
My perfect pizza analogy (the lesson in it) is just a symptom of the battle in my mind that has been going on for decades. If God did not give me this spirit of fear, but a spirit of power, love and sound mind, yet I resist stepping forward in such mature functioning, then obviously I am not living the Scriptures. Is my mind truly renewing if I am still fighting this battle years later? Obviously, I have not been transformed enough yet. If I am holding myself back, how am I free? These questions and more play in my mind since Sunday, so for now I’ll leave off and hope you’ll come back to read part 2 of- The Perfect Pizza.