You are a casserole

Photo by sheri silver on Unsplash

If I make a big bad choice after lunch, I can often link it to a small not-so-bad choice I made around breakfast.

For example, let’s say I say something snippy to my wife as we’re getting ready for the day. I feel bad about it, which often means I feel bad about myself. The temptation comes over me to think of the day itself as bad or to think of myself as a bad person.

Once I start thinking about the day or my self as bad, I will find it hard to not act on those thoughts for the rest of the day.

So, for example, I may choose to go through the McDonald’s drive-thru at lunch instead of eating the healthy leftovers at home. And why not? The day is bad. I am bad. Bad people make bad choices on bad days. Why should anyone expect anything else?

This is what counselors and therapists call “all-or-nothing thinking.”

The day is either all bad or all good. I am either all bad or all good.

All-or-nothing thinking is what turns a minor mistake in the morning into a series of bad to worse choices as they day goes on.

I didn’t know about all-or-nothing thinking until I was in my forties. The first person to tell me about it was a friend who is a recovering alcoholic. He told me about how all-or-nothing thinking could turn any little mistake he made into an excuse to drink himself unconscious.

A couple of years later, I listened to an interview with a psychologist who works with people who struggle because of their high-achiever personalities. I am a high-achiever personality (also known as “Type A”) and I feel like I suffered a lot because of it. The psychologist said that all-or-nothing thinking causes high-achievers to give up and quit if they make many mistakes whenever they start something. High-achievers imagine that the only way to do something is to be perfect or “pure” about it. When high-achievers make mistakes, they think they make their pursuit *im*pure and, therefore, not worth pursuing any longer.

When I learned about all-or-nothing thinking, it was like someone turned on the lights in my mind. So much of what I thought about myself made sense for the first time.

One of the biggest burdens that I bore in life was the burden of not measuring up to what I thought I should be as a Christian.

The Christian tradition in which I grew up (and to which I still belong) puts very great emphasis on “being a good Christian.” Over the generations, our tradition formed a definition of what it means to be “good.” As a child, teenager, and young adult, I learned that being a “good Christian” mean following the rules that our tradition taught as “truth.”

I learned the rules and learned them well.

I also learned that I could not obey them. When I did manage to obey them, I did so with only half (or less) of my heart.

Imagine what that did to me as a high-achiever with my all-or-nothing mind!

I started every day in the light and set out to do good. But I ended every day trembling alone in the dark, begging for God’s mercy.

As many high-achievers do, I broke down and burned out (more than once). I exiled myself from Christianity and gave into addictive behavior.

I figured that if I couldn’t be pure, then I shouldn’t even bother at all.

Around the time that I was finding out about all-or-nothing thinking, I started to notice something about the Bible heroes whose stories I read all my life: Most of them were not what you or I would call good people. Many of them were what we would call “hot messes.” Not one of them was pure.

When I compared myself to some of them, I actually came out ahead.

So how, I thought, did they end up as “Bible heroes”?

The common thread I found is this: They just believed God and tried to follow him, even as they went on being hot messes.

They figured that their salvation was up to God and nothing more, so they just kept fumbling along in hope that God would get them home in the end.

In other words, the Bible heroes were not high-achievers; they were humble believers. They were not all-or-nothing thinkers; they were all-God-or-nothing thinkers.

I heard someone put it this way today: We and our lives are not Tupperware; we are casseroles. We are not air-tight, squeaky-clean containers where everything has its own place; we are dishes full of hot messes.

As it turns out, God isn’t looking for Tupperware; God wants casserole!

God wants you just as you are–hot mess and all.

So forget perfection and purity; those things are self-centered and will suck the life out of you. Be a casserole. Be a hot mess. Believe that God is happy to have you just as you are. Trust that the love of God is for you whether you’re at your best or at your worst. God’s love is all the same.

And enjoy just living in that certain love.

You are a casserole.

Grace and peace.