Improving on Perfection (Friday Devotional)

His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

- 2 Peter 1:3

When the iPod first came out, people were amazed by all its features: hundreds of songs in one portable device! ten hours of battery life! all your songs digitally sorted by album, artist, and even genre! There was no doubt, the iPod was a game changer.

But as the novelty wore off, nitpickers found something they didn’t like. The “shuffle” feature, which played songs in a random order, didn’t seem to be working correctly. Too often, songs from the same album would play one after the other, or three songs in a row by the same artist. What was so random about that?

As you might suspect, the iPod’s shuffle algorithm was ensuring the songs were played in a random order—but, just as you can flip a coin and have it come up heads 10 times in a row, so too was the shuffle feature occasionally producing truly random clusters that nevertheless looked suspiciously patterned. The shuffle algorithm was providing perfect randomness—but clearly that wasn’t what people had in mind. So Steve Jobs and Co. wound up bowing to the pressure of their fans, tweaking the algorithm in order to produce results that were less strictly random but seemed more so. As Jobs himself put it, “We're making it less random to make it feel more random.”

As the iPod’s shuffle controversy proves, sometimes even perfection doesn’t satisfy us. One of the least attractive things about our fallen nature is our tendency to pick apart and criticize even the most beautiful things in life, from the sunrise obscured slightly by clouds to the solo with one missed note. Instead of appreciating what we’re given, we can’t seem to help looking for the flaws.

Amazingly, this goes even for how we regard the almighty, gracious, forgiving God of our salvation. When we are tempted, we wonder why He doesn’t intervene; when we stumble, we question whether He cares. Even when we thrive, it can feel emptier than we expected, leaving us to wonder why God didn’t make discipleship just a little bit easier.

When you find yourself nitpicking God’s presence in your life, the words of 2 Peter 1:3 are useful to remember: “His divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.” In other words, in Christ we have been given everything we need and far more than we deserve. His Word and his Spirit, to say nothing of his grace, are more than enough to get us through any circumstance.

There will undoubtedly be times when it feels like God’s perfect will doesn’t cut it—when His grace doesn’t feel gracious enough, when His power doesn’t feel powerful enough, when His love doesn’t feel loving enough. In those times, pray for the discernment to tell the difference between the appearance of perfection and the reality of it. God has given you what you need to do His perfect will—now it’s up to you to stop looking for the imperfections and get to work.