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Performances

             Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2)

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. (I Corinthians 9:2)

Look right. Smell right. Only say the right words. Donate to all the right causes. No matter where you go or what group you’re part of, there are expectations. Scripture is no different. Be perfect. Be holy. Be everything to everyone. I could add love God with everything in you and love your neighbor as yourself. It’s not that all these things are bad things. Many of them are quite good. But they all have performance in common.

Performance is normal, natural, and necessary. It’s like behavior. When people say something about behaving, I point out that they’re either going to behave well or badly, but either way, they must behave. We must perform, and all other things being equal, most of us would prefer that we and everyone around us performs well. “They” shouldn’t perform as well as “we” do. We don’t want competition, but when it suits our purposes, they should be the world’s best at what they do.

Since it does no good to say, “Let’s decide performance doesn’t matter,” we are left with the task of walking the narrow and crooked line between the impossible and the indolent. It’s also a line between stressed out and disobedient, or between burned out and lazy.

This is another area in which we are often attacked. We are not good enough, but we might be better than someone else. It’s not right for anyone to demand such a level of performance from us. There’s not enough time. We’re not strong enough. The list of objections goes on. We…just…can’t. We either try to obey and perform and fail or we rebel. Both take their toll on our relationships with God, with others, and with ourselves.  And the devil’s objective is achieved.

The solution is to keep our focus on the relationships, and to consider the purpose of the performance to be the deepening of those relationships.

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