I love it when a provocative quote gets inside my head and starts messing with me! That’s been the case all day today since reading this from St. Francis of Assisi:
We can patiently accept not being good. What we cannot bear is not being considered good, not appearing good.
I think that’s something that fits in the category of ‘brutal truth’!
We all know we’re imperfect. We all know everyone around us is imperfect. And yet we still all feel this strange need to appear perfect.
Talk about entrapment.
Related to all this, just yesterday I wrote this:
Most of us have a tendency to try and cover up our brokenness; fixing those cracks with invisible glue. What if we started to celebrate them and draw attention to them instead? Rather than pretending they don’t exist, we need to embrace our brokenness as part of our story, shining a light on the cracks!
Our imperfections – our brokenness – need not be sources of shame. They can be beacons of hope and healing – both for ourselves and those around us.
Embracing our imperfection, our brokenness, is our pathway to true freedom.