Impressions about Perfection

Tonight, for family scripture study, we read and listened to Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's talk titled "Be Ye Therefore Perfect—Eventually." In this talk, Elder Holland talked about perfection, what it means, why we can't achieve it in this life, how we can achieve it eventually, and why we should neither slack in our efforts to achieve perfection nor demean nor vilify ourselves when we fall short. It was an excellent talk, and I'm not sure I can do any part of it justice by blogging about it. Still, I can talk about some of the impressions this talk left me with. Thankfully, those impressions included comfort and hope.

I know I'm not perfect. I am horrendously, monstrously far from perfect. I won't detail my sins in this blog post, but suffice it to say that I have sins that I struggle with. We all do. And yet, for now, that is all God asks of us. He knows we sin; He just asks that we try not to. And when we fail, that doesn't change the plan. He just wants us to keep trying. We don't need to beat ourselves up about being imperfect. Beating ourselves up doesn't accomplish anything. We just need to keep trying, keep learning, and keep striving to improve, no matter how much room for improvement we have.

I've blogged before about how Distance = Speed x Time. Spiritually speaking, perfection is a near-infinite distance from where we are now. At any speed, it would take us an eternity to cover that distance. Thankfully, we have an eternity of potential improvement ahead of us. That's part of what Eternal Progression means. As long as we strive to make progress, no matter how slow that progress is or seems now, we will ultimately reach perfection - eventually.

So, when I fall short of my goals, I'll try not to demean or vilify myself for being imperfect. As Elder Holland reminded us, we are imperfect people living in an imperfect world. The goal is not to reach the goal in this life. The goal is to use this life as an opportunity to make some progress at striving toward the goal.

We aren't perfect, and in this life, we aren't going to be. Our goal now is to get ourselves onto the path toward perfection and to develop the habit of striving to follow it.