I just finished it this week. My most recent writing project, one big enough to deserve color-coded outlines and a notebook full of research materials, which I will unreasonably hang onto even though they have served their purpose. It’s an accomplishment eleven months in the making—far longer than such projects normally take me, and about five months longer than my energy for completing it lasted. The last half of it, in fact, was grueling work that reminded me of a hiking trail I once traveled in Utah whose final mile was entirely switchbacks.
Even now, I can’t quite believe that it’s behind me, and while I know that what I have produced is, in an objective sense, good, I can’t exult in that yet. I feel somewhat like athletes I’ve seen at the end of Olympic races; while reporters gush about how they shattered the world record, they give a halfhearted smile preoccupied by pain and seem utterly distracted by how quickly they can reach some Gatorade.
Eleven months is frankly too long for a project of this scope. By the end of the timeframe, I feel as if I’m simply slopping words onto pages, cross-eyed and creatively clogged, spiraled so deep into the project that I might simply drown in my own ink-stained notebook pages. And this project didn’t take too long because it was especially difficult or incredibly ambitious. Nor was I sidetracked by the allure of new ideas or delayed by procrastination. Instead, I was mired in a much more serious problem: the need to be good.
“I just want it to be good.” How many times did I say this during the eleven-month interval? It started during the outlining phase. As I scribbled down my initial concepts, I panicked. Each one sounded too trite, too far-flung, too boring, not believable. I scratched out faster than I scribbled forward. I tugged ideas here and cut them there and stitched them together over the seams of what I’d had until the entire thing felt fragile under its own weight. But I just wanted it to be good.
And then came the writing, where again the blinking cursor kept the tempo of my terror. It wasn’t working. It sounded lame. It could surely, surely, be better. Sixty thousand words were thrown out one night when I sat up stiff with what I believed was a glorious idea. Five days later, the glorious idea dumped me in no-man’s-land, and I had to go crawling back to those sixty thousand words with an apology in my hand. I dissected as much as I designed. But I just wanted it to be good.
And then, of course, because I’d followed the road straight to this dead end, writer’s block walled itself around me. I sobbed under steel-eyed skies some days. Other days, I rambled on long walks through open country, tiptoeing around my brain like a sleeping baby—are you rested yet? Can you go back to work soon? And then I had the existential crises—was I meant to be a writer, after all? What if the project was doomed, and I with it? I’d tried to build an ocean liner, yet all I had was a leaky raft. (Small wonder, when I tore down faster than I built up, when I punched the holes in the paragraphs with my own fists.)
And still, when my mom—better trained than I in all the ways I spiral—hinted that I was pushing too hard and pulling too tight, I slid behind the shield of my sparkling explanation. “I just want it to be good!” A holy excuse, after all—one that elevated my overthinking into worship, one that dressed my sinful striving in noble garments. I wasn’t a perfectionist; I was a priest, placing a perfect sacrifice upon my artistic altar. I was, simply put, The Good Christian, writing The Good Book, ready to present all my Goodness to God.
And finally—now—it’s done. And it is good. But it is good, I see now through my exhausted eyes, in spite of me. In the face of all the ways I yanked this project from His help, God sent His Spirit to hover over my blank pages. But I know, in the certainty of my soul, that this time He worked against me. That this time, I did not dance with Him; instead, I played tug-of-war.
And so after all these days—after all the fear and frustration and groaning and grinding, after my mom’s hints became full-fledged warnings and my manuscript seemed to shred itself under my hands more each day and my cry of goodness still rang defensive—I think, all this time, I was called to offer up something different. Not goodness…but my desperate desire for it.
This is one of those blurred gray fringes of theology, and I—I hate it. My black-and-white caricature rises up, ready-armed with Scriptures to hurl like hand grenades. Nonsense! It must be good! Doesn’t the Bible say to do all things with excellence? To not present sacrifices that cost nothing? To do our best work for the Lord and not for men?
Yes—but what does that mean?
Do all things with excellence? What excellence was there in my sweating and striving and wrangling and wrestling? What excellence in crowding my creativity right out?
Not present sacrifices that cost nothing? Ah, but God knows that if I present my need for control…my desire for perfection…my desperate desire to grasp goodness…that is the costliest ointment I could pour on His feet.
Work for the Lord and not for men? Who was I really working for, all this time? Was it the Lord, as I so piously proclaimed? Was it truly the loving Father shoving me toward a pinprick of perfection that shrank with every new sunrise? Was God reading over my shoulder, draping His disapproval across me?
Or…was I working all the time for me? My fears. My frustrations. My feverish attempts to be good…or good enough. It’s the enough that damns us, isn’t it? The enough that pulls off the mask and shows off our attempts for what they really are.
Because it’s not just my manuscript I attacked with driven desperation. It’s not just my words I rewrote and my paragraphs I purged and my story that sank sadly below my ironclad expectations. It’s myself too. I want—I crave—to be good. If I try harder…if I am very careful…if I make no mistakes…
But how can I move forward—how can I ever grow closer to the Father’s heart—if I’m everlastingly editing myself? I know what will happen then. I’ll rewrite one page of my life, over and over and over again, stuck in my own spirals.
And that is not goodness.
I look at the Bible to see what this word means, what this elusive bar of self-perceived judgment was saying all along. Psalm 107:1 leaps to me. O give thanks to the LORD, for He is good…
A quick study reveals that the word used for good here is tobe, a Hebrew adjective. I skim the list of synonyms.
Good. Pleasant. Agreeable. Excellent. Rich. Valuable. Becoming. Glad. Happy. Prosperous. Kind. Benign.
The list brushes my fevered efforts like a cool summer breeze. And one question arises for me. So this is goodness?
What has been kind, glad, happy, benign, pleasant, agreeable, and valuable in my treatment of my manuscript—in my treatment of myself? The paradox pulls me close, turns me inside out. When I reach for goodness—when I struggle and scrabble to reach my version of perfection, for my own gratification—then I am perhaps farther from the goodness of God than I am at any other time.
Our righteousness is like filthy rags, the Bible whispers. A condemnation, I’ve always believed. But now—a confession? Perhaps even—a celebration? Because if I could stop walking white-knuckled, maybe I could finally take His hand.
So if I can’t manufacture goodness—if I can’t dig it up from within me—where can I find it?
The earth knows, in these summer days, because all the truly good things are simply becoming, one breath at a time. The flowers are unfolding and the grass is reaching above its roots and the clouds are curling around the edges of the sky. The baby birds shatter from shell and gape wide-mouthed and then teeter on the edge of unknowing and take to wing. The sun laughs, eager in the east, and follows on the heels of God as He walks across the sky each day.
And so maybe I see it, finally. The secret. My wild and desperate strivings will end with a manuscript hollow with holes and bleeding red ink. My urge for perfection, my craving for control, will produce a life drained dry and a heart bullying itself. But following the feet of Jesus…choice by gentle choice…rising with Him in the morning and reaching for His light during the day and resting soft with Him in the cicada-singing evenings…
Is that not kind, glad, happy, benign, pleasant, agreeable, and valuable? Is that not the patience and the peace of keeping step with Him?
“When I was a little girl,” said renowned author Madeleine L’Engle, “I used to say my prayers, ending, ‘and God bless me and make me a good girl.’ As I grow older, I become less and less sure that it was a good prayer, as I become less and less sure what being a good girl actually meant.”
And that is where I find myself—in the space between my childish concept of goodness and the rich rejoicing of God’s definition. Will I inhabit this space perfectly? Of course not. Will I still tug toward what I can control, what I can create? Undoubtedly. So what have I learned?
Probably nothing. Maybe everything.
I print off the pages of my manuscript, black ink marching across the white paper. Black and white, but perhaps the blending of the gray is no longer to be feared. I scan the first page, and I feel it, that seductive call—could this have been better? Could that have been different? You just want it to be good…
Except now I know what good is.
I stack the papers together and leave them with my editor, the little pile of my best work, and I walk away from the voices that hiss that I could make it better. I walk outside, into a world still living summer just through obedience like the loosening of the leaves. And in the holy hush between afternoon and evening, I imagine I can hear Him, looking upon the song of the summer and the story of my soul, with the same smile that He once beamed upon the earth in harmony with itself: It is very good.