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

by Shauna Niequist

Here’s the love: it’s in marriage and parenting. It’s in family and friends. It’s in sacrifice and forgiveness. It’s in dinner around the coffee table and long walks. It’s in the hands and faces of the people we see every day, in the whispers of our prayers and hymns and songs. It’s in our neighborhoods and churches, our classrooms and living rooms, on the water and in the stories we tell. And let me tell you where it’s not: it’s not in numbers—numbers in bank accounts, numbers on scales, numbers on report cards or credit scores. The love you’re looking for is never something you can calculate. It’s not something you can buy or earn or hustle for. It’s something you discover in the silence, in the groundedness, in the sacred risky act of being exactly who you are—nothing more, nothing less. In that still, holy space, the love you’ve been frantically hunting for all along will bloom within your ribs. And you will know, in that moment, that it has been there all along, like a whisper, the very Spirit of God himself.