I am someone who craves perfection, although knowing I will never be able to achieve true perfection. I can often be found working for goals that I would never be able to achieve. I crave the feeling of cool I get when I make something new and unique, using my creative part of my mind as muscle that I strive to strengthen every time that I turn around. This craving feeds into my desire to control many things in my life.
Yesterday, when I was on the phone with my brother, he accidentally hurt himself and I thought, based on the circumstances, that is was my fault. I was torn up to pieces, but calling my friend helped me talk it out and even if what I thought happened had happened (which it hadn't) it still wouldn't be my fault. I felt helpless because I was two and a half hours away and unable to go help. My friend pointed out that my feeling of helplessness rooted from my desire to control everything I came into contact with. He cited a specific example from the year before.
My friend and I were both on a Rube Goldberg team and we would often take the lead of it to help keep things organized and moving along. We had an entire plan of how things were going to work the day of the competition, but nothing went according to plan and I freaked out. I wanted things to go according to plan, but when they didn't, I didn't know where to go. I was and am scared of the unknown and the feeling of helplessness that comes with it.
My Christian faith has told me that I don't have control of everything (if anything) in my life. Instead God has control of them. God gives me little surprises and shake ups like this to remind me that I am not in control of my life.
Luckily, my brother was not hurt very bad. It was a big relief, but also an eye opening experience for me. My adrenaline was still pump about an hour later and I wasn't even moving too much. I was light headed and worried like crazy.
This is also another lesson God had taught me during this time. Based off the scriptures in the Bible, God makes in extremely apparent that we are not to worry, for we know that God has everything under control. We may not know how things are going to go because we don't control them, but we do know that the one who does control them is only looking out for us and doing it because he loves us.
Going back to my striving for perfection, I always want to be able to get as much of my work done as early as possible, but this is a goal I constantly fall short. I make lists of things I need to get done and when and I always seem to fall short of what I am supposed to get done. Striving for goals I can't keep has always been the best way for me to do my best. The goal never becomes a limitation for me then, but the problem is that this can often be discouraging and I end up creating mini goals to achieve my main goal. While this helps, the workload I am experiencing now has made it much harder for me to achieve my big goals and the seem more unrealistic. I am still learning to make more realistic goals and it is really starting to help me.
Part of the reason I created this blog website was twofold. The first being that it gave me something that I could spend my time making as perfect as I possibly could and giving me a more productive method of spending my time and the second being that it gave me something else I could control. With what I learned from the incident yesterday, I realized I didn't want complete control over it, so I have made the decision to write about something I can't control, life. Which brings me to the topic of today's post, "What am I going to write about on this blog website?" And the answer is anything that is going to be going on in my life. Maybe it can help someone who reads it. Maybe no one will read it. It gives me a place to write out the things that had happened to me and allows me to analyze them more thoroughly so that the messages God sends me can be made clearer not only for me, but also for those around me.
Thanks,
Seth Pohle