Sometimes it strikes me as odd that Christ, the Living Word of God, should be so simple in his speech. So often when Jesus preaches in the Gospels, he adopts an understated approach, dispensing with rhetorical flair in exchange for a message so straightforward that its radicalism is easily missed. After a long day of sermonizing on a certain mountain, Jesus follows up his forthright admonitions regarding divorce, adultery, oaths, and an eye for an eye with a simple summary: “Be perfect,” he says, “just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

If I had been present at Jesus’ perfectionism presentation that day, I think I should have jumped to my feet and exclaimed, “Lord, if what you say is true and it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, then surely you know that it is easier for an elephant to pass through a pore on my skin than for me to be perfect!” Perfection—as I hope I would have rightly and respectfully pointed out to our Lord and Savior just then—is an impossibly high standard, emphasis on the word impossibly. Christ calls me to something he knows I will inevitably fail at, and all I can wonder is why?

At times, perfectionism can pose a stumbling block for us spiritually, sometimes even more than our sin itself, if you can imagine such a thing. Upon leaving the confessional and having vowed to sin no more and inevitably ending up doing it again, we may feel disproportionately disappointed with ourselves for having broken our promise. The shame that results is no longer about the root sin itself but rather a record or private reputation we have to uphold, feeling an acute distress at having sullied our clean slates yet again. If you’ve experienced this, you know the lies shame can spin: that what we’ve done has permanently marked us, that we are irredeemable and unforgivable, that we will never be so whole again. At one point, I confessed that I hadn’t gone to confession in a while specifically so as to avoid confronting my sin because even though I had repented long ago, I could not deal with the fact that, once again, I had failed to be perfect for a God who deserved so much more from me.

Yet while it is all too easy to get caught up in our sin in these ways that are unhealthy and unproductive, we must strive to recognize and remind ourselves of the existence of grace. Every day is an opportunity to be made new. In this Lenten time of repentance and inward reflection, I want to emphasize that being perfect as Christ calls us to be does not mean being a perfectionist. Indeed, being perfect as God would have us be seems, rather, to be open to the possibility of being an imperfectionist, facing our occasions of sins with humility and acceptance rather than mortification or avoidance when they appear. Being “perfect” seems to mean learning from our mistakes, getting up when we fall, and refusing to be mastered by our own self-narratives that say sin has had its way with us. Rather than lamenting what sin has done with us, perhaps we might better spend our time asking what we might do with our sin. When Christ calls us to be perfect this Lent, we can respond with a whole-hearted yes knowing that while perfection is the ideal, failing and finding our way once again has merit too. It is in this place of imperfection and repentance that we truly experience grace.