The Problem with Self-Improvement
I am highly susceptible to self-improvement plans, especially those that lay out steps to success: Do these 5 things and you will be a better wife, mother, employee, friend, Christian. I desperately want someone to show me the way to be the best me I can be.
For some of you, red flags are waving madly in your brain right now, but since the self-improvement market was valued at $9.9 billion in 2016, I’m guessing many of you are as susceptible as I am.
We want to be thinner, smarter, richer, fitter, better organized, more fashionable, more successful. We want to have better marriages, be better parents, enable our children to be more successful, cook healthier, more delicious meals, make our homes more welcoming and Pinterest-worthy, travel, save for retirement.
We want to rise within our careers, be respected in the church and the community. We want our posts to go viral and our Instagram accounts to present an aesthetic-pleasing, enviable life.
A few years ago, I took a class with Jerry Sittser in which he said he prays these words every morning: “You are God, and I am not.”
Add to that idea these words from Flannery O’Connor: “I measure God by everything that I am not. I begin with that.”
When I sit with those words, I am released from the slavery of self- improvement. In fact, I want to run in the opposite direction: Here I am, guys. Here are all my flaws. I love to eat for comfort. I am a terrible housekeeper. I don’t love being in nursery. I don’t even like people much of the time. I forget who God is. I don’t always love the homeless. Sometimes I write for attention.
Self-improvement makes me want to hide the bad parts of myself instead of doing what I was meant to do – run to God and cry out in my weakness, confess my sins to other people and invite them into my failures.
I like Jerry’s prayer because it sets a different trajectory for my day. And I love Flannery’s words because they remind me that no amount of striving will make me worthy. My weaknesses, my failures, my recognition that “He is God and I am not” drive me toward Him for the love that no amount of self-improvement can earn.
Barbara Comito