MICKEY MOUSE AND A LESSON LEARNED

Perfection is not the same thing as excellence.  To strive for perfection is to try to control everything and to feel that your world cannot survive without you, whether it’s your circumstances, marriage, family, workplace, team, or friendships.  Perfection is what the world wants from you.  If we’re not striving for perfection, our culture makes us feel like a worthless nonproductive bystander.  Perfection generates arrogance. 

To strive for excellence is to excel in who God made you to be.  You recognize your abilities and opportunities and strengths, and you accept your limits.  God reminds us by saying, Don’t cherish exaggerated ideas of yourself or your importance, but try to have a sane estimate of your capabilities by the light of the faith that God has given to you all (Rom. 12:3 Ph).  Excellence is what God wants from you because it requires faith in Him, belief in His truth, and trust in how He has created you.  To strive for excellence is to give your all for God’s purpose in your life.  It’s to trust His infinite wisdom, His purpose in all things, and His comprehensive administration.

To try to be someone else other than who God made you is to abuse who God made.  And that is arrogance.  If we follow the script the world gives us, this is where it leads.  In Disney’s Fantasia, in the animation of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Mickey Mouse plays the apprentice and uses sorcery to bring to life a broom to do the chore his master wants done – fetching water in a bucket.  This is not just laziness.  Mickey is too arrogant to do something so lowly, working slowly within the limits of his own body.  But Mickey has started something he can’t stop.  When the water is flooding the room and the broom still will not stop, Mickey chops it up, and soon hundreds of headless brooms are carrying water and drowning Mickey in the fulfillment of his ideas, which are beyond his abilities and limits.

That’s the revenge we can expect when we strive for perfection according to what our culture wants from us, when we try to be what we’re not, when we disrespect the abilities and opportunities God has entrusted to us, and when we don’t accept our limits.  The oppression it brings is a life of inhuman competition.

Striving for excellence doesn’t mean we are less energetic or less enthused about life and what God has called us to do.  On the contrary it’s about going forward full throttle according to God’s design and purpose for us.  As you received from us instruction as to how you ought to walk and please God, that you excel still more (1 Thess. 4:1 NAS).  Some of you need to press on the accelerator to follow God’s direction and let Him do the steering.  Strive for excellence, not perfection.  Love God, love others, and love yourself.