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

by Shauna Niequist

“Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ.”

we chose to be present over pretending to be perfect.

Present Over Perfect is an open-armed invitation to welcome the people we love, and even ourselves, back into our lives.

God hasn’t invited us into a disorderly, unkempt life but into something holy and beautiful—as beautiful on the inside as the outside. 1 Thessalonians 4:7, The Message

“Stop. Right now. Remake your life from the inside out.”

This journey has been about love, about worth, about God, about what it means

to know him and be loved by him in a way that grounds and reorders everything.

Richard Rohr says the skills that take you through the first half of your life are entirely unhelpful for the second half.

Years ago, a wise friend told me that no one ever changes until the pain level gets high enough.

And in this current sea-change, my disconnectedness from my soul and from the people I care most about has become so painful that I’m willing to remake the whole of my life.

My life is marked now by quiet, connection, simplicity.

But there is a peace that defines my days, a settledness, a groundedness. I’ve been searching for this in a million places, all outside myself, and it astounds me to realize that the groundedness is within me, and that maybe it was there all along.

Now I know that the best thing I can offer to this world is not my force or energy, but a well-tended spirit, a wise and brave soul.

You don’t have to damage your body and your soul and the people you love most in order to get done what you think you have to get done.

Someone told me recently that we experience a fundamental change every seven years.

someone gave you a completely blank calendar and a bank account as full as you wanted, what would you do?

The very thing that makes you you, that makes you great, that makes you different from everyone else is also the thing that, unchecked, will ruin you. For me, it’s lust for life. It’s energy, curiosity, hunger.

Part of being an adult is taking responsibility for resting your body and your soul. And part of being an adult is learning to meet your own needs, because when it comes down to it, with a few exceptions, no one else is going to do it for you.

Which brings us, literally, to the heart of the conversation: the heart, the cavernous ache. Am I loved? Does someone see me? Do I matter? Am I safe?

You can make a drug—a way to anesthetize yourself—out of anything: working out, binge-watching TV, working, having sex, shopping, volunteering, cleaning, dieting. Any of those things can keep you from feeling pain for a while—that’s what drugs do. 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.

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

I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you are not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

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.

work is easier to control than a hard conversation with someone you love. That’s part of the challenge

of stewarding a calling, for all of us: you get it wrong sometimes. And part of stewarding that calling is sometimes taking down some chairs. We have more authority, and therefore, more responsibility than we think. We decide where the time goes. There’s so much freedom in that, and so much responsibility. That old question: But what are you going to do? I’m going to take down some chairs.

My mentor’s words rang in my ears: Stop. Right now. Remake your life from the inside out. I don’t know a way to remake anything without first taking down the existing structures, and that’s what no does—it puts the brakes on your screaming-fast life and gives you a chance to stop and inspect just exactly what you’ve created for yourself, as difficult as that might be.

Bless them. But don’t spend too much time with them. 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.

And don’t worry: no won’t always be the word you use most often. I hate that for a season, no had to be the answer to almost everything. But over time, when you rebuild a life that’s the right size and dimension and weight, full of the things you’re called to, emptied of the rest, then you do get to live some yes again. But for a while, no is what gets you there.

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.

Time always helps me make these decisions, because if I’m rushed, I always say yes. When I have time, I can instead say to myself: Go back to being loved; go back to your purpose. This thing I am being asked to do will not get me more love. And this will not help me meet my purpose.

That’s why knowing your purpose and priorities for a given season is so valuable—because those commitments become the litmus test for all the decisions you face.

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. I have this much time. I have this much energy. I have this much relational capacity.

It’s at the lake that I realize how far I’ve come, or how far I have yet to travel. Both, maybe. It’s at the lake that my priorities reshuffle, aligning more closely with my true nature.

Part of the magic of the lake is that it isn’t home—it’s away, and away allows us to see the rhythms and dimensions of our lives more clearly.

Simple, connected to God and his world and people, uncomplicated by lots of stuff.

But those voices are liars. The glass of cool water is more lovely and sustaining than the firehose will ever be, and I’m starting to trust the voices of peace and simplicity more than pride and gluttony. They’re leading me well these days.

The stillness feels sort of like walking on the ceiling—utterly foreign. What makes sense to me: pushing. Lists. Responsibility. Action, action, action. What’s changing my life: silence. Rest. Letting myself be fragile. Asking for help.

the hustling that had so deeply compromised my heart was an effort to outrun the emptiness and deep insecurity inside me.

I’ve been ungrounded for so long—attaching to whatever I can, whenever I can, flailing around to feel connected to something bigger than myself. I attached cognitively to the idea of God. But I didn’t allow myself to be seen, vinegar and all, and so I cut myself off from the healing oil, from the grounding.

“Exactly,” I said, “and this is a breath of fresh air from what we grew up with.” I told him it was like we all grow up with half a pie, and part of being an adult person of faith is finding the rest of your pie.

Christians ought to be decidedly anti-frantic, relentlessly present to each moment, profoundly grounded and grateful. Why, then, am I so tired? So parched? So speed-addicted? Again, the fault lies not with the tradition but with the perversion of it, and with the Christian herself—in this case, of course, me.

But as I learn to dwell in the silence of my own heart, I’m finding myself drawn to the silence of nature—of water, land, expanse. As I learn to trust the stillness I’ve been running from for so long, I’m finding that I crave more and more silence. I’m drawn back to the water, to the sound of the waves instead of the sounds of traffic and the blare of action and excitement.

sovereign, divine reality. She looked confused, understandably. Could you pray to Jesus? she asked. Would that be uncomfortable for you? Could you pray to him as though he is right here in this room, a man, alive, with a body?

I love being a Christian, but I think sometimes I err on the side of believing in the ideals, or, on the other side, connecting with God through his creation, through the face of a child or the words of a friend or the color of the sky. The ideals and the tactile stuff of the world, yes, but the person of Christ: almost not at all.

but I was not a deeply loved friend or trusting and fragile daughter.

In the same way that I didn’t allow myself to be taken care of by people, I didn’t know how to let myself be taken care of by God.