Lent 2013, Day 21: Good vs. Perfect

Every year, I eat an entire box of Samoas Girl Scout cookies, the kind with chocolate and caramel and toasted coconut, in one sitting.

I don’t know why it’s Samoas as opposed to Thin Mints or Tagalongs that triumph every time over my self-control. I don’t know why I just don’t order Samoas. I am simply powerless over them. This year, I finally acknowledged that–and for me, that was an important step.

I’ve lost a lot of weight several times in my life. Each time, I ended up regaining most of it, a pattern that typically began with berating myself for falling off the healthy-eating wagon in a time of stress or at a party, and then giving up entirely. I saw my choices as perfection or nothing.

Sometimes, we take that same attitude in our faith journeys. We despair when we mess up and fall prey to a bad habit, whether it’s gossiping or yelling at our kids or failing to develop a more active prayer life, then we figure what’s the use and stop trying. And when we do, evil wins and we lose. To paraphrase a priest friend of mine, we let “perfect” get in the way of “good.”

It’s important to keep in mind that God doesn’t demand perfection. What he asks is that we recognize we’ll never move forward in a permanent way on any of our temptations or challenges without his guidance. He and we win when we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, seek forgiveness, and try again for the second, hundredth, or thousandth time.

And as for me and those Samoas? This year, I chose not to beat myself up. I savored every bite. I enjoyed each of the 75 calories per cookie. And I added time to my workout. Maybe next year I’ll be strong enough not to order them. Maybe I won’t. But fourteen Samoas won’t be the undoing of what’s becoming a habit of overall conscientious eating.