The Way Back to Center

Maybe perfection isn't never getting it wrong.

Maybe perfection is learning how to come back into alignment.

Human beings are remarkably good at overcorrecting.

If a car begins drifting toward the shoulder, the dangerous response is to panic and jerk the wheel as hard as possible in the opposite direction. You may avoid one ditch only to cross three lanes, hit another car, or crash on the other side.

The problem was real.

The correction was real.

But the correction became another problem.

I wonder how often we do the same thing with our lives.

And with our faith.

The pendulum

Someone realizes they haven't taken care of their health.

They feel guilty.

So instead of beginning with a walk, improving a few meals, sleeping better, and building consistency, they declare war on the person they were yesterday.

Six workouts a week.

No sugar.

No cake.

Daily weigh-ins.

Every meal becomes good or bad.

Every movement of the scale becomes a verdict.

They don't simply start exercising. Exercise becomes part of their righteousness.

Soon they may begin looking differently at people who aren't doing what they're doing.

How can they eat that?

Why don't they take care of themselves?

Then one day they eat the cake.

Shame.

They miss a workout.

More shame.

The scale goes up two pounds.

Something must be wrong.

Eventually the rigid system becomes impossible to maintain.

Fatigue.

Injury.

Burnout.

Then the pendulum swings all the way back.

The attempt to escape one extreme created another extreme.

Religion can do this too

A person wakes up to something in their life they genuinely want to change.

Maybe sex.

Alcohol.

Anger.

Pride.

Pornography.

Materialism.

Whatever it is, conviction can be valuable.

But conviction mixed with fear and shame can become overcorrection.

Suddenly every emotion becomes suspicious.

Every desire becomes dangerous.

Every person living differently becomes a threat.

The person who recently struggled with something themselves may become the loudest voice condemning everyone still struggling with it.

Religion can become image management.

Appear righteous.

Say the right things.

Be seen serving.

Know the language.

Identify everyone else's sins.

And quietly become terrified of anyone discovering that you are still human.

Jesus repeatedly confronted that kind of religious performance.

The danger of hypocrisy isn't merely that somebody breaks a rule.

It's that we begin demanding a standard from others while hiding our own complexity—and eventually start believing the image ourselves.

A mask can become so convincing that even the person wearing it forgets it's a mask.

Rigid branches break

A healthy branch moves with the wind.

A completely rigid one snaps.

I think people can become spiritually rigid in the same way.

We can become so certain that every difficult feeling is evil, every disagreement is rebellion, every temptation is demonic, and every person outside our interpretation is deceived that faith stops producing peace.

Fear gets projected outward.

We start diagnosing other people's spirits instead of examining our own hearts.

We can even condemn others in the name of protecting them from condemnation.

That's another pendulum swing.

And if I condemn those people for doing it, I've joined the same cycle.

The question has to come back to me:

What is this producing in me?

Fear needs alignment too

Scripture says:

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” — Proverbs 9:10

And:

“God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” — 2 Timothy 1:7

At first those can sound contradictory.

Maybe they're guardrails.

One keeps me from believing I am God—reverence, humility, moral seriousness.

The other keeps me from living terrified of God—panic, paralysis, obsession.

Between them might be something healthier:

reverence without terror.

The same may be true for every emotion.

Anger doesn't have to become wrath.

Desire doesn't have to become exploitation.

Sadness doesn't have to become hopelessness.

Confidence doesn't have to become pride.

Discipline doesn't have to become punishment.

Compassion doesn't have to mean pretending nothing is wrong.

Love, honor, and respect may mean learning to hold the full human experience without allowing any one part of it to seize the steering wheel.

Jesus, take the wheel

Maybe I've misunderstood that phrase.

Maybe Jesus taking the wheel doesn't mean violently turning the car away from everything human.

Maybe it means keeping it aligned.

Correct when necessary.

Not panic.

Not oversteer.

Keep moving.

Scripture's treatment of wine is an interesting example.

Jesus turned water into wine.

Scripture also repeatedly warns against drunkenness.

Those are different statements.

There is a difference between enjoying something and being ruled by it.

That distinction—between use and domination, desire and enslavement, freedom and excess—requires discernment.

Rules are easier.

Alignment is harder.

Rules can sometimes tell us exactly where a boundary is.

Alignment requires honesty.

Sin, commandments, and the heart

I've also started wondering whether we sometimes collapse every spiritual question into one category.

Is every sin a direct violation of an explicit commandment?

What is principle?

What is wisdom?

What is conscience?

What is cultural practice?

And what does it actually mean for something to separate us from love, truth, God, or one another?

Those questions deserve more humility than they often receive.

Marriage is one example.

Christians agree that covenant, fidelity, commitment, and sexual responsibility matter deeply, while Christian traditions have not always described the legal, sacramental, communal, and spiritual dimensions of marriage in precisely the same way.

A government certificate clearly has legal meaning.

But the deeper spiritual question is larger:

What makes a covenant a covenant?

I don't think Living Ascent needs to pretend that question has an easy answer.

It needs to create room to ask it sincerely.

Two hands coming together

This is the image I keep returning to:

🙏

Two hands moving toward one another.

Not one hand destroying the other.

Not one extreme defeating its opposite.

Coming together.

Maybe sanctification sometimes looks like that.

The divided parts of us becoming integrated.

Body and spirit.

Conviction and grace.

Discipline and rest.

Reverence and peace.

Truth and mercy.

Strength and tenderness.

Accountability and unconditional love.

Not because every behavior is equally healthy.

Not because boundaries don't matter.

But because transformation built entirely on hatred of who we were tends to reproduce hatred somewhere else.

The vine

Jesus said:

“I am the vine; you are the branches.” — John 15:5

A branch doesn't grit its teeth and manufacture life.

It remains connected.

And the Father prunes.

That doesn't sound to me like a gardener furiously attacking a tree because it failed to become perfect fast enough.

A gardener understands seasons.

Growth.

Weather.

Disease.

Fruit.

Timing.

Some things need to be removed precisely because the tree is alive.

And creativity may be part of that life too.

Music.

Dance.

Painting.

Writing.

Building.

Cooking.

Teaching.

Parenting.

Helping another human being.

If God is the vine, perhaps our healthiest creative expressions are branches—different forms emerging from the same source of life.

The branches don't all look alike.

They aren't supposed to.

Something strange happened this morning

I had been thinking about the vine.

Branches.

Pruning.

Sanctification.

Then I looked up.

A woman was standing in her front yard cutting a branch from her tree.

She looked over at me and simply said:

“Good morning.”

Maybe it was coincidence.

Maybe it wasn't.

I don't need to know.

The image was enough.

The gardener wasn't angry with the tree.

She was tending it.

Maybe that's perfection

Not never drifting.

Not never sinning.

Not never becoming afraid.

Not never eating the cake.

Not never getting angry.

Not never losing our way.

Maybe spiritual maturity is noticing sooner.

Correcting more gently.

Becoming less ashamed of needing correction.

And returning again and again to the source that teaches us how to love.

Perhaps sanctification isn't an increasingly violent war against ourselves.

Perhaps it is learning to let God prune what is dead without cutting away everything that makes us alive.

And perhaps perfection is not standing frozen at the exact center forever.

Maybe perfection is becoming increasingly skilled at finding our way back.

The goal isn't the opposite extreme.

The goal is alignment.