I will not make the same mistakes that I did during undergrad, I told myself as I flipped through notecards. I stared at the foreign words as I forced them into memory. But each time I changed cards, the previous memory had already begun to fade. I exhaled as I stared at the mound of cards laying on my couch. Too many, I thought; this is too much.
But what else was I to expect? This was my master’s degree I was working towards earning. Of course studying would be more challenging. Achieving a high GPA would not be as easy – I knew this. Yet the desire to have a 4.00 rather than the 3.831 from my bachelor’s degree spurred me to keep reading the messy words on the abundance of notecards.
Throughout my first semester, this is how my evenings and weekends played out. I studied and read more than I had ever done so in undergrad. Not that I did not enjoy the readings and necessity to actually learn the material – everything I read entailed interesting concepts that related to my career.
But at the end of the semester, I awaited my final grades with as much anxiety as I had waited for my first exam.
Some universities treat all A’s with equal credit, distributing 4.00 units to their students’ transcripts, preserving perfect GPA’s for the high-achievers. These high-achievers can make 90’s and receive no punishment of a lowered GPA; instead, 90’s can actually help them in raising their GPA’s. But this was not the case at either my undergraduate or graduate universities. In both private schools, all A’s were not created equal.
And for a recovering perfectionist, receiving an A- for a class during my first semester equated to failure.
However, God used the despair in the A- to reveal the shaky ground on which I had laid my foundation. I had always wanted to be the wise one (like Solomon, right?), yet even the slightest falter would set me back into old habits of chasing wind.
“And I [Solomon] applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” Ecclesiastes 1:17-18
Now, don’t get me wrong – knowledge and wisdom can certainly be good things. However, when I made them into idols, they became markers of my identity that rid me of my joy when I did not perform perfectly.
However, we as Christians have an unswerving joy in the One whose “foolishness…is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25). Any wisdom I achieve pales in comparison to God’s wisdom, but I can rejoice in this certainty because “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise” (1 Corinthians 1:27). Even though I may be far from perfect, my God is using my imperfections to reveal His perfection.
And this perfection comes only through Jesus, who is the “wisdom from God” (1 Corinthians 1:30). Through Jesus, we can know God and know that our hope lies only in Him. When we place our hope in our performance, we will fail because we are human and imperfect. However, Christ lived a perfect life so that we do not have to. And we can rest in His perfection rather than stress over our imperfections, “so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord'” (1 Corinthians 1:31).
