Good Enough: Learning to Let Go of Perfect for the Sake of Holy

By Wendi Nunnery

You’ve checked all the boxes. You’ve followed all the rules.
 
But something has still gone terribly wrong.
 
This is where Wendi Nunnery—Jesus follower, college graduate, and newlywed—found herself eleven years ago. After years of meeting all the expectations set for a “good” Christian girl, she was suddenly spiraling into an unknown terror she would later discover was Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and questioning everything she’d ever known about herself and about God.
 
It took nearly a decade, but eventually Wendi learned her value was fixed. Finished. Holy. And it’s in the pages of this book where she lays out the story of how and invites you to come along, find a friend, and realize you are not alone in your wandering.

Driven by thoughtful, poignant essays with just the right amount of colorful language, Good Enough tackles the lie that we are required to be perfect in order to be good and, most importantly, reveals the truth about how much we’ve already been given.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781640605442

Wendi Nunnery

Wendi Nunnery is the author of The Best Kept Secret and The Next Best Thing. She is also the founding editor of Lady Literary Magazine and her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Simply Beloved, and Introvert, Dear. Wendi is a proud alumna of Georgia Southern University who believes life is better with a little bit of colorful language. She lives, loves, and mothers in Atlanta, GA.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The first introduction to this book was a bit different from the one you’re reading now. A few years ago, I had an idea I felt compelled to share, a truth that had cracked me open and left me split in two halves: one half the little girl who grew into a young woman convinced that just one more right decision would settle her restless quest for perfection, and the other half a wife and mother who had finally learned why that quest was a magnificent waste of time.

As I put my fingers to the keyboard and began to write, I was unaware of what I would endure in the next two years or how the lesson I thought I’d already learned would continue to show up. It is a lesson for a lifetime, it seems, and this book is both a testament to the wisdom God has shared with me and an exploration of just how much more I have to learn.

Perhaps like yours, my whole life has been spent trying to live up to an impossible standard. While I’ve often been good at things, very rarely—if ever—have I been the best. I have lived an above-average existence in terms of what the world would label a success, and yet there is a constant sense that I don’t measure up. I still walk around this beautiful life and wonder, Why am I not doing this better?

I have fallen hard for the lie that tells me perfection is the goal: for motherhood, marriage, friendship, work, health, and, most of all, for faith. I scorn myself for failure and then, once I’ve tired of that, run in the opposite direction and settle into the muck and mire as if I belong in it, as if simple acceptance of my flaws is all there is to life. I make a home in my mess, comfortable in the knowledge that being flawed means I don’t have to expect so much of myself.

But that’s not really satisfying either. That’s just another kind of bondage.

I’m tired, to tell you the truth. I’ve been running in circles for a long time, like a dog chasing her tail, in an effort to be the person who never disappoints. I have sought to garner love and salvation from those who are not equipped to give it. The temptation to people please has danced right beside my desire to honor God, and I have pulled myself to pieces as I have switched from one to the other and back again. Right when I think I’ve got the answers all figured out, an unexpected hand gets dealt, and I wonder how much longer this house of cards I’ve created will hold up.

The fleeting pleasure of affirmation or a soothed ego only ever gives way to more striving, more chasing. I have followed all the most popular rules of my faith, never rocking the boat or making noise, and what I have to show for it is a beautiful, well-ordered existence and an inner life of turmoil. The most intimate, authentic pieces of my soul are guarded under lock and key for fear that if I let them out, my whole world will collapse. This is arrogant, I know. It’s also the legacy of an evangelical culture quick to turn believers into performers. I play god because religion has taught me the rules and now I can execute them in my sleep, no actual God required.

I know what Jesus has done for me. My mind is fully aware of what his death and resurrection mean, but the knowledge doesn’t always translate to action. Because of this disconnect between mind and spirit, I have too often settled into the bland, self-righteous pursuit of perfection where as long as I follow the rules, I can rest easy.

But rest never comes. There is always another expectation to meet, another sin I must grind out, another box to check. Perfection is a heavy burden to try to carry on our own. This was the first lesson of Eden. God’s children mistook their own free will as an equal alternative to his love, convinced they could do better, could be perfect without him. Because God is good, he offered a way for us to be made whole again. Holy, as God intended, once more.

Perhaps you think of good enough as second best—second place—and if we’re honest with ourselves, none of us like to come in second. (As a die-hard Atlanta Falcons fan, I can tell you this from experience.) The lesson that’s been hard won for me as I’ve fought for my mental health and tried to make room for God to deconstruct my long-held convictions about what is good, better, and best is that, in Christ, the work is done. It is all finished.

We’ve heard that before, but let’s talk more about what it means.

To be perfect is to be without flaws, without errors of any kind. Think of Perfection as a creature designed to answer every question and meet any need. She knows all the answers to our questions about God and the church. She is contoured and shaped to fit every beauty standard, and everyone loves Perfection from a distance. But up close, Perfection is incredibly boring and has no real concept of what’s good.

Holiness is a whole other level of perfection, one that comes by way of grace, repentance, and relationship. It is not your morality, your knowledge of Scripture, or even the affirmation of your faith community; it is a gift given by love. Holiness is our transformation into the likeness of the Savior, and it comes to everyone who chooses to follow him. Perfection is what we try, and fail, to attain. Holiness is what we’ve already received.

Perhaps, like me, you are tired of wasting time. That’s why this book is in your hands, and it’s why I wrote it. I thought of you often when I put these words to paper, of the faith you believe requires perfection, of the exhaustion that trails your every step, of the wonder you’ve lost in the effort to never mess up. I don’t know you personally, but if you’re like me, then the cost of your striving has been immense. While things have often looked just fine on the surface, your internal world is one that has been driven by the perpetual fear of failure and sin. The potential for loss is always great when we put our faith in the wrong gods, especially the ones we create for ourselves.

Underneath all the pretension and dogma, we know that there is so much more to being a Jesus follower than what the church sometimes offers. We know the searing pain of addiction and loss, depression and divorce, infidelity and illness, and we keep it locked up because, collectively, we are still trying to steer the ship ourselves. We are still running after perfect when what we need, what we really want, is holy.

Whether you have been a believer your whole life or have walked in faith for just a few months, I hope that in this book you will meet a kindred spirit. I hope that as I learn to see myself as good enough, you will too. Not because we’re settling for less than or denying that our souls long for more, but because we have already accepted good enough as the gift of Jesus’s glory upon us, and there is nothing more incredible than that.

This book will not be perfect. That’s kind of the point. Some of you will love it and a few of you will hate it. But there is one of you who will read this book and see herself reflected back in its pages. She will recognize her story in mine and come to learn, as I have had to learn, that devotion to the rules and faithfulness to God are sometimes two very different things. It’s for this woman that I write. It’s for this woman, and for all the women like her, that I pray.

These words are an invitation for us to be okay with our neediness and allow it to move us in a different, bolder direction. They are an invitation to honor rather than fear the rules because the rules are signposts directing us to Jesus. They are an invitation for us to step out of the rat race and onto the platform of Christ’s declaration that we are good enough. They are an invitation for us to quit looking for perfect where it will never be found and to lose ourselves in the wonder of holy.

More than anything else, they’re the belief that we have already been given what we’ve been searching for all this time.

Part One

Learning the Rules

CHAPTER 1

Longing for Home Runs

I have discovered that the realities of adulthood are more confusing than the questions of childhood ever were. For children, there are older, (hopefully) wiser people in our lives to direct the traffic of ideas that, without proper guidance, would drive us into dangerous situations (such as leaping from a twelve-foot jungle gym onto a trampoline and into a very shallow above-ground pool). When I was a kid, adults had one primary role to play, and more often than not they played it well: to make the rules. And I was a champion rule follower, jungle gym notwithstanding.

For me, rules were easy to follow. I was privileged to be raised by loving parents who worked hard to make sure my siblings and I could enjoy being kids. Life got pretty nuts in middle school when my mom and dad divorced, but still I enjoyed the simplicity of a well-ordered life. Right and wrong were black and white, and because I loved my parents so much I longed to please them and succeeded in all the ways that mattered to my Southern, Christian culture (for girls, anyway): I was always home by curfew, I didn’t have sex, I didn’t drink or smoke, I made good grades, and I had pretty responsible friends. If I stepped outside the boundaries laid down by my parents, I experienced swift and thorough consequences. It didn’t take much to keep me in line.

Following the rules seemed as if it would get me pretty much anywhere I needed to go in life, and for a long time it did.

Until suddenly it didn’t anymore.

What we learn as we grow up, as we’re being shaped and conformed to standards set by those who came before us, is that life doesn’t go by these rules. Tragedy doesn’t listen to guidelines. Pain and suffering do not see our road signs and say, Oops, let’s turn around and go back! The world operates on an axis completely out of our control, and so does every other person we meet. In fact, sometimes we wake up and discover that we are the ones we can’t control. The rules no longer apply because the rules no longer make sense. The life we were living has shifted—perhaps it has been shifting for years without our notice—and like a ship whose navigation has been altered by a single degree, we have ended up somewhere we did not intend. At this point, we have to relearn the rules or toss them out completely in order to survive another day.

For me, there was so much shame in this discovery. I thought it was God I had been relying on for direction and purpose. In reality, it was the rules and not God in which my identity was found. When the rules stopped working in my favor, I assumed my identity was also lost, that it had vanished along with the value I believed my adherence to them had given me.

If this sounds familiar to you, we would probably be good friends. For the better part of a decade, I stumbled around in the dark looking for a new light to follow, a new set of rules that would once again order my life in a way that made sense. I don’t know whether it will take ten years for you or if, perhaps, your being here will abbreviate the journey. But I do know that there is only so long you can avoid what your own body, your spirit, or God is trying to teach you. Sometimes the lesson comes over time, slow and steady, and sometimes it smashes into you with hurricane force. Either way, the challenge of accepting and applying the lesson falls on us. I pray with fervor for a change in the way we think about the rules, but it took a confrontation with my own long-hidden fears about failure in order for me to even see that a change was necessary. This book is the place where I lay down my need at the foot of the cross and ask you to join me, because it is there, and only there, where we will experience the sought-after transformation we hope to find on our Pinterest boards and Instagram feeds.

Growing up, I was a strong and solid softball player. Strong and solid are the words I’d use to describe most of what I’ve accomplished in life. I am never superb or number one or insanely, outrageously talented. I am strong and solid. Reliable. Counted upon. I am neither forgetful nor memorable, but somewhere in between. Above average, I suppose. I will not lie and tell you I’ve been satisfied with this outcome. All I ever wanted as a kid was to be the best at something. To impress. To get people clapping on their feet because of the awesomeness with which I succeeded. Succeeding was not satisfactory enough. I wanted to exceed. But on the softball field, as in many other cases, I was simply strong and solid.

I will never forget the first time I hit a home run. I was ten years old and towered over every boy in my grade. My dad—muscular and athletic and very, very patient with me—and my mother—a veritable beast on the softball field—had taught me everything I needed to know about how to hit well. I’d discovered the trick to hitting the ball where I wanted it to go, but while I was confident in my skills at that point, three years of playing recreational softball against the best players in my age group without ever hitting a home run had left me with the bitter taste of jealousy and day-old Big League Chew in my mouth. The time had come for me to show them what I was worth.

It was my last at-bat for that game and our team was ahead. I stepped up to the plate, adjusted my too-large helmet, and took my stance with the swagger of