Addition by Subtraction

When I was a younger Christian, I thought that I’d eventually have it “all together.” I expected to become the “complete package,” strong in every important spiritual quality. But I have been greatly disappointed. Not only have I not achieved completeness in any spiritual quality, I have only come to learn I am so far from being complete that I’ll never get even close—that I’ll always be incomplete in just the ways that I had deemed it important to be complete.

But, amazingly, this has turned out to be good news. In my incompleteness, I have been forced to turn to God and found that in Christ, I am complete. In fact, I now suspect this was the point all along, not for me to become complete in and of myself, but rather to learn I needed Christ to make me perfect, and, hallelujah, that He had done so.