When you’re little, everything is black and white or rainbow coloured. It is not until you are much older that you begin to see the grey areas. In choosing a friend, I have learnt that no one is perfect, we all have good and bad sides but what will matter is whether the goodness overshadows the bad.
And so it begins, we walk through life with that understanding and sometimes the realisation can be heart breaking. I’m pretty sure that’s what led to the phrase ‘never meet your heroes’ because no one turns out to be as amazing as you initially thought. Take for instance the new Batman movie (about to drop a spoiler!), where Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne discovers that his father wasn’t the absolute good man he always thought him to be.
So many lessons can be learnt from that scene; that good people can make mistakes, that your parents could disappoint you and most germane of all, that nobody is perfect. I think that’s why there is such a thing as scandals, the marriage you thought was perfect has a cheating spouse or an upstanding citizen turns out to be a fraud. They become scandals because the ideals we had been nursing are suddenly shattered.
There is no ideal. Whoa, I don’t know about you but that last phrase made me a little sad. It’s sad but true and come to think of it, I don’t think it has to be sad at all. Because we’re all imperfect, we all know that there is no ideal to us, we are all just trying to figure this life out. I believe that accepting our own imperfections helps us to understand and accept the imperfections of other people as well.
Our own mortality creates in us a sense of empathy for other people. We strive to do our best in life but we understand how someone could fall and this helps us to show grace and forgive quicker when we have been wronged. This understanding is one of my favourite things about Christianity, the realisation that only a perfect God could love an imperfect me absolutely is humbling.
Life has a way of humbling us all, a scatter-brain friend or a dyslexic sibling or a spouse that snores. If we ever have the privilege of forging intimate relationships that is when we get to see these imperfections and aware of our own, we readily embrace them, realising that life does not require perfect people just people willing to see the best in others.