Pursuit - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

About ten years ago I was working with this therapist and it was a very good fit. She and I had both grown up in similar religious, geographical, and cultural contexts, and we both had come to similar places in our relationships with those things. Which is to say I felt heard and understood, and she was able to speak a language to me that didn’t need a lot of translation. I learned a lot from her about life and about myself. But the thing she taught me that may stick with me the most – at least on a conscious level – was something about God. 

I was speaking with her about the pursuit of perfection: My desire to get everything right, to be the right kind of person, and specifically my belief that I needed to make all the right choices in order to be that right kind of person. I wanted to get it right, you know. And I wanted to get it right for God. It seemed like the least I could do. But I put a lot of pressure on myself to do that: To get it right for God, to make the right choices for God. To be the person God thought I could be. I was not able to see what a burden I was placing on myself in all this. But my therapist saw it.  

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