How many of us have the tendency to place extremely high expectations upon ourselves? I am guilty of that. Are you? Why do we do this? God doesn't put these expectations on us, we do it to ourselves. Many times we do this because we have a performance based mentality. Say for instance, that you grew up in a home where you very seldom ever got compliments or encouragement unless you performed at a level that met with your parents expectations and approval. When you performed everything within the specifications or guidelines of what your parents thought were acceptable they gave you positive reinforcement.
Looking at this from a learned behavior perspective, we can agreeably conclude that as we proceeded through life, school, friends, activities, sports and social gatherings we incorporated this mindset, not only into our way of thinking but also into our way of life. In other words, we allowed this to be a learned perspective and not simply just a learned behavior. Cause and effect. We can also become so bent on doing everything the right way that we lose sight of having any balance in our lives. Whatever we do, we go to the extreme of it because our motivation is driven by our performance. The height of our performance is comparable to the height of our success.
Our sense of accomplishment, our well-being and our high assurance in our capabilities becomes the driving force behind all we do and say. We become so engorged in doing everything right that we fail to see ourselves through the eyes of God. God sees us a forgiven, God sees us as accepted, God sees us as His children and He knows full well that we are far from perfect. Now, having said this, I also want to clarify something else for a moment. This also doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for the excellence. We very well should indeed! Here's my point though, don't beat yourself up when you make a mistake, fail or make a wrong decision. See, when we live our lives built upon the foundation of performance = success, we can become very demonstrative in ushering in condemnation whenever we miss that invisible mark that says it's "perfection or nothing."
The key is balance. This gives us the grace to be less than perfect. Here's the truth, we will make mistakes, we will make wrong decisions, we will have failures in our lives at some point and time and we will bounce back. Why? Because God said so. His grace is sufficient for us all, His love is unending and He's patient and long-suffering. What are we? Just the opposite, we are judgmental, we are impatient, we don't approve of people making mistakes or having faults and we certainly don't have unconditional love towards anyone. Do you see the difference? Major difference! How many of us give people the benefit of the doubt? Not very often. What do we normally do? We base acceptance off of compliance.
If a person is compliant then we will give them our acceptance. However, if they travel outside the boundaries of what we have designed for them to stay within ... we can become extremely unreceptive to anything they say or do. Why do we do this? I believe it's due to the fact that we have immersed ourselves so deeply into being performance driven that we don't understand any other concept. Nothing else makes sense to us. It's been ingrained within our minds and we have been programmed to respond to things on the default of "if you cross over my boundary I have established for you, then you will lose my acceptance."
I learned alot from writing this post ... and my hope is that you've learned something reading it. God bless!
Staying In His Grace,
Tracy ;)
http://www.egbnow.org
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