I’m in a group right now for my business called List Builders. It is run by Jane Hamill. Just an aside, if you have a business and you sell a physical product Jane is a great person to follow and she has a podcast and everything. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. She says over and over that done is better than perfect. I have thought, every time I hear her say that that she is right and I’m already doing that. And I am, sort of. In my business I send out emails all the time with typos and I post things on Instagram that have mistakes or the photo sort of is terrible so I just nod my head and figure she isn’t talking to me.
Until this morning. I woke up and got distracted by some other things and didn’t get right into my scriptures and so my scripture time got spent doing other things and I was just ready to hop and and skip it because I no longer had the allotted amount of time to do it “right”. Right in this case means spend 30 minutes reading the words and looking up the footnotes and references and really thinking about what I read. What that also means is that my prayer time was mostly gone too.
Recently I have been skipping my prayers and scripture study more often than I’d like to admit. Much of the reason has to do with wasting time in the morning scrolling through Instagram or Twitter. And so I am sacrificing what’s important for something that could definitely be put off until later.
But here’s the other thing. I could open my scriptures and instead of reading a whole chapter I could pick one or two verses. I could look up the references on those one or two.
I could pray in the shower rather than not doing it at all.
At night I neglect to pray so often because that would require me to climb out of bed again or because one of my kids is in my room with me hanging out and I don’t want to tell them to leave.
This morning when I looked at the clock and decided again to put off time with God so that I could get to work on my list, I heard Jane Hamill in my head. I know that most of you hear your mother and usually I do too but not today.
Done is better than perfect.
Then I imagined what Jesus would say to me if I told Him straight up that I wasn’t going to spend time getting to know Him better because I had only 5 minutes rather than 30 or because I wasn’t praying because I couldn’t kneel by my bedside.
If I’m trying to make a friend and I am always waiting for the most perfect time to call her or ask her to visit then it’s not going to happen. My whole life, when it comes to religion I have been putting things off because the perfect time isn’t here. But I wonder if Jesus would rather I have a conversation with Him while I’m walking to the kitchen to get my breakfast than to not call on Him at all. I’m pretty sure I know the answer.
Of course there will be times when things are quiet and I can kneel by my bed and I can spend an hour in the scriptures and it will be my job to grab hold of those perfect times and not spend them scrolling social media or watching one more episode on Netflix. But this morning isn’t that time. So, one verse it is, and a prayer while I cut out the pattern for the baptism dress I volunteered to make will do. And I feel pretty strongly right now that that’s going to be ok because of the lovely warm feeling I had just run through me.
Done is better than perfect because He already did the perfect part and it’s up to me to just keep trying.
Always Choose Charity 