The Bar

A college friend and I recently discussed a double-standard we have encountered in our professional and personal lives. For the first twenty-five years of our lives, my generation has been encouraged to think for ourselves, be independent and shoot for the stars, but now that we are beginning to use that freedom and independence, many of those who wished it for us are expressing disappointment with the end result.

The examples are everywhere but I'll give you two. I know several people who have suffered severe breaks with their parents and grandparents because after years of going to youth retreats and Christian schools, their faith does not look exactly the way it did when they were children. What did they expect? I met a man a few months ago whose parents encouraged him to be open-minded and treat women well, but were extremely disappointed when he gave up football to work for a sex-trafficking awareness non-profit. Both of these groups of people are good, kind, compassionate people of integrity and I can't help but wonder, if they are a disappointment, what is the standard?

So I ask you, do we really want our friends, kids and spouses to reach the standard we set? It appears the parents I mentioned above might be second-guessing the prayers they prayed over their children in their cribs. 

Let's take that one step further. Do we really want to reach the standard we set for ourselves? The perfect job, perfect relationship, perfect house? Because we all know we're not actually going to get them. Why do we demand so much of ourselves, only to be as unreasonably disappointed as parents who want open-minded children to never change? The Millennial generation is shooting themselves in the foot here and the solution isn't settling for less, it's appreciating what we have. 

Growing up, everyone and his brother told us to set the bar high. I'm beginning to think there was an extreme miscommunication here. In this seemingly simple encouragement, my generation did not hear set, we heard high. I think the intended message was you set your own destiny, you create your future and no one else. But what we heard was, always aim high, anything less than the top is failure.  This is very important. We learned that fame was more important than how we acquired it. As a result, we created a standard that makes us feel like we failed and leaves us with no understanding of how to properly recover or try again. And now that we're having kids, we give out ribbons for showing up so that they won't feel like failures the way we did. 

I think we do the same thing to the Gospel. I once heard a pastor say that Americans are far better at adding to the Gospel, adding rules and standards, than they are at cheapening it. We are a nation built on overworking - for both our jobs and our salvation. To this, God says, "Why do you think I'm disappointed in you? I didn't create that rule for you, YOU did!" When we fail to meet the Gospel standard we created, no only are we convinced that we are bad people, we are convinced we are bad Christians. We are irretrievable and hopeless because, since our standard is so fluid and emotion-based, we have no idea how to recover and get back to a point of grace. But that's the beauty of grace - we don't have to get back to it. Rather than swing the pendulum back to a place where we are still working for it, we simply have to remember our Sonship and be thankful for what we most assuredly have. 

Once we know our salvation is secure, maybe then we won't demand perfection in this life because we know it will only be found in the next.