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

by Shauna Niequist

The two sins at play here, I believe, are gluttony and pride—the desire to escape and the desire to prove,

The inciting incident for life change is almost always heartbreak—something becomes broken beyond repair, too heavy to carry; in the words of the recovery movement, unmanageable.

trusting my ability to hustle more than God’s ability to heal.

quiet, connection, simplicity.

I believed it was better to measure my life by metrics out there, instead of values deeply held in my own soul and spirit.

This is what I know: I’ve always been a more is more person, and something shifted this summer. Something inside me said no more. No more pushing and rushing.

Who wins, then? I handled it all! I showed them! But who is “them”? Who cares? Whose voice am I listening to? What am I trying to prove? What would happen, what would be lost, if I stopped, or if I slowed down to a pace that felt less like a high-speed chase all day, every day?

and all my deepest desires and fantasies involve sleep and being left alone. My greatest dream is to be left alone? Things have gone terribly awry.

fake-rested

I fake-rested instead of real-rested, and then I found that I was real-tired. It feels ludicrous to be a grown woman, a mother, still learning how to rest. But here I am, baby-stepping to learn something kids know intuitively.

And, used like a drug, over time, shopping or TV or work or whatever will make you less and less able to connect to the things that matter, like your own heart and the people you love. That’s another thing drugs do: they isolate you.

Busyness is an illness of the spirit. —Eugene Peterson

But at some point, good clean work became something else: an impossible standard to meet, a frantic way of living, a practice of ignoring my body and my spirit in order to prove myself as the hardest of hard workers.

As I unravel the many things that brought me to this crisis point, one is undeniably my own belief that hard work can solve anything, that pushing through is always the right thing, that rest and slowness are for weak people, not for high-capacity people like me.

Oh, the things I did to my body and my spirit in order to maintain my reputation as a high-capacity person. Oh, the moments I missed with people I love because I was so very committed to being known as the strongest of the strong. Oh, the quiet moments alone with God I s...

Productivity became my idol, the thing I loved and valu...

The world that made sense to me was a world of earning and proving, and I was gutting it out just like everyone around me, frantically trying to prove my worth.

When you devote yourself to being known as the most responsible person anyone knows, more and more people call on you to be that highly responsible person.

People called me tough. And capable. And they said I was someone they could count on. Those are all nice things. Kind of. But they’re not the same as loving, or kind, or joyful. I was not those things.

On the other side was just more work.

Anyone who knew you as an adolescent and still wants to spend time with you is a true friend, and really, their opportunity to blackmail you with stories of who you kissed and photos of you in overalls is enough reason to keep them around. We don’t see each other nearly often enough, but when we do, we fall right back into familiar rhythm, like a song we’ve been singing all our lives.

And there we were, utterly resigned to lives that feel overly busy and pressurized, disconnected and exhausted.

We were all raised to build, build, build. Bigger is better, more is better, faster is better. It had never occurred to us, in church-building or any other part of life, that someone would intentionally keep something small, or deliberately do something slow.

Loving one’s work is a gift. And loving one’s work makes it really easy to neglect other parts of life.

hoping to be honest about which ones matter more than the others.

If I work in such a way that I don’t have enough energy to give to my marriage, I need to take down some chairs. If I say yes to so many work things that my kids only get to see tired mommy, I need to take down some chairs.

There have been times I’ve hidden behind my work, because work is easier to control than a hard conversation with someone you love.

And I realized all at once that I’d spent all my yeses, and in order to find peace and health in my life, I needed to learn to say no.

But you can’t have yes without no. Another way to say it: if you’re not careful with your yeses, you start to say no to some very important things without even realizing it. In my rampant yes-yes-yes-ing, I said no, without intending to, to rest, to peace, to groundedness, to listening, to deep and slow connection, built over years instead of moments.

Draw close to people who honor your no, who cheer you on for telling the truth, who value your growth more than they value their own needs getting met or their own pathologies celebrated.

What you need along the way: a sense of God’s deep, unconditional love, and a strong sense of your own purpose. Without those two, you’ll need from people what is only God’s to give, and you’ll give up on your larger purpose in order to fulfill smaller purposes or other people’s purposes.

I’m finding that many of our friendships actually grow when we’re more honest about what we can and can’t do.

I’m committed to a particular, limited amount of things in this season, and if what’s being asked of me isn’t one of those, then it stands in the way.

We disappoint people because we’re limited. We have to accept the idea of our own limitations in order to accept the idea that we’ll disappoint people.

Here’s what I know: I thought the doing and the busyness would keep me safe. They keep me numb. Which is not the same as safe, which isn’t even the greatest thing to aspire to.

But so many of us, myself chief among them, have forsaken those natural rhythms and stayed at full speed, through the night, through the storms.

I was highly invested in maintaining my reputation as a very capable person.

But this is what I’m learning about prayer: you don’t get the oil until you pour out the vinegar.

He doesn’t ask me to show up and catalog my strengths. He doesn’t ask me to show up and abuse myself for my failings. He asks me to bring my whole-fragile-strong-weak-good-bad self, and that starts with vinegar, and it makes a way for oil.

He is love itself, grace embodied, holding the fullness of who we are—strong, weak, good, bad, wild, fearful, brave, silly—in his hands. He can be trusted with every part of it, the silly and the enormous.

You cannot taste the oil until you pour out the vinegar. And it’s okay to admit that there’s vinegar—all the small hurts and enormous fears. You pour it out, letting the all-powerful God who knows you and loves you see you as you are, the scariest thing any of us can do: allow ourselves to be seen.

Try to keep your soul always in peace and quiet, always ready for whatever our Lord may wish to work in you. It is certainly a higher virtue of the soul, and a greater grace, to be able to enjoy the Lord in different times and different places than in only one. —Ignatius of Loyola

he told us that we never take communion. We receive communion. Taking, he said, is what happened in the garden. Receiving is what will put the world back together again.

Poetry and music, silence and imagination, a wide and holy space for God to demonstrate his nature to us in all sorts of ways, drawing us nearer, teaching us to see with new eyes.

our God is so big, bigger than one church or one way or one tradition, and he uses such a wide and holy variety of people and voices and practices,

It seems to me that Christians, even more than anyone else, ought to be deeply grounded, living a courageous rhythm of rest, prayer, service, and work. That rhythm is biblical, and it’s one that Jesus himself modeled. It seems to me that Christians ought to be free in meaningful and radical ways to bow out of the culture’s insistence on proving and competing. Again, like Jesus. It seems to me that Christians ought to care more deeply about their souls than their bank accounts and pants sizes. But I am a Christian, and I am guilty of all these.

We do for him, instead of being with him.

Nature, of course, connects us back to that innate sense of having been created—of order and beauty and humility. We have been made. We are fragile. We live in connection to water and air and plants and sunshine, and when we acknowledge those things, we acknowledge our Creator.

Psalm 8: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?”

Jesus, when I think of him, is the face of such love, such deep connection, it makes me feel uncomfortable with my own need, with needs that I don’t want to admit to having.