As I grew older and encounter different kinds of situations and dealt with different kinds of people, the more i have looked at my own life honestly, the more convinced i am that a lot of misery can be traced to one mistaken notion: we need to be perfect for people to love us.
nothing can make us feel worse about ourselves than the conviction that we don't deserve to be loved. and nothing will generate that conviction more certainly than the idea that when we do something wrong, we give God and the people closest to us reasons not to love us.
we may have gotten this message of perfection from parents who genuinely loved us and demonstrated that by correcting our every trivial mistake and by constantly urging us to do better. we may have gotten this message from teachers who praised only perfect papers and showed impatience when we did something wrong. saddest of all, we may picked up this same kind of message from our religious leaders --- that God holds us to strict standards of right and wrong, that he knows every nasty thing we do, even our secret thoughts, and that every sin we commit separates us from God's love. yet why would God set us up for failure, establishing a standard that not one of us could possibly meet? he knows us all too well to demand perfection from us.
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