Slightly Imperfect

Not long ago my wife and I stopped by a candy store. I have to be honest, we weren’t going to buy any candy – we were there for the freebies. You know the ones I'm talking about, the samples they promised in big letters, the “slightly imperfect” pieces they could not sell but which would taste just as good as the unblemished variety. I would like to say that we had a great time, but to our dismay, the only pieces of candy were the kind no one wanted – and they looked like it. Mold wasn’t exactly growing on the candy, but – what was that white, fuzzy, stuff?

Slightly imperfect - I guess that describes a lot of things. My wife married me almost thirty-five years ago – I wonder when she discovered that I was “slightly imperfect?”

I have two great children whom I love, and my wife and I probably counted their fingers and toes when they were born and declared them perfect. Of course, then we brought them home from the hospital and, well, you can guess the rest. At least we love them – imperfectly, of course.

I like the way The Message translation gets at God’s choice of us in 1 Corinthians 1:26f: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of ‘the brightest and the best’ among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’?... Everything that we have – right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start – comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, ‘If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.’”

You get the point – everyone of us is more than a bit “slightly imperfect.” You want something to thank God about? Here it is – knowing you and me as we are, He chose to love us, come to us through His Son, and offer us life. He came to us nobodies and made us somebody because of Jesus. Slightly imperfect, yes, of course. A bit moldy, tossed aside and neglected by others, perhaps. But God wasn’t looking for the unblemished variety that wouldn’t see their need for Jesus in the first place – He is content with the less than perfect that He might do His perfect work of grace in our lives. He knew what He was getting and chose us anyway. So go blow a trumpet for God and celebrate His tremendous grace.