Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living

by Shauna Niequist

You were only meant, created, commanded to be who you are,

What do you need to leave behind in order to recover that essential self that God created?

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and realize that the best thing about me was I was organized. That

But I’ve always been surrounded by people with strong opinions, too. And I’ve learned a very complicated geometry about which things I’m “allowed” to feel strongly about.

One part of this journey, of course, was learning to say no. I couldn’t have remade my life without that very important word.

We talked about what had happened to create our most fragile seasons, and what repaired them. We talked about the kinds of people and personalities and attention that we might find ourselves vulnerable to, if we weren’t careful. We apologized to one another for the things we did, over the years, to allow distance to stretch; and we talked about what shores up that distance, what ways of living and interacting help us connect in deep ways, keep the vulnerabilities from growing too great.

It is only when you understand God’s truly unconditional love that you begin to understand the worth of your own soul—not because of anything you’ve done, but because every soul is worthy, every one of us is worthy of love, having been created by and in the image of the God of love.

“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”

Many of us, myself included, considered our souls necessary collateral damage to get done the things we felt we simply had to get done—

Our souls are of fundamental importance, truly the only things besides our physical bodies that we are entirely, independently responsible to steward.

And so Jesus’ question—what does is profit someone to gain the whole world and lose their soul?—is a way of demonstrating the paradox of getting everything you want, only to find yourself unable to truly experience those things you’ve worked so hard for.

Now the most beautiful, well-tended, truly nurtured and nourished parts of my life are the innermost ones, not the flashy public ones. That’s just as it should be.