On Thursdays, I go to the Green Mill in Lakeville for Trivia Night because some of my fellow cast members from Mind Over Matt were part of the team “Just For Fun” (which is kind of a misnomer since some of them are ultra-competitive) and they invited me to join them after Thursday night rehearsals. But most of the team came together because they’re members of the same church. They’re not Bible-thumpers by any means, but sometimes religion will come up in conversation.
There was one time I mentioned something about how some person or people were perfect—I don’t think I was referring to myself because I’m way too humble to say that out loud—and one of them commented that no one is perfect, that God created us all as flawed human beings. Something along those lines, anyway. I can dig that: we’re all sinners, Christ died for our sins, God loves us anyway, etc. (I don’t mean to belittle religion, but I don’t want to do any research to find biblical quotes for the lead-in to this blog entry.)
My question is this: even though God created us as imperfect beings, aren’t we still perfect in some sense?
The universe was created. *BOOM!* And then there was light and oceans and Elvis and a bunch of other stuff. From that point, everything that has ever happened was based on a cause-and-effect relationship. What happened only a second ago led to this moment in time, exactly the way it should have. Cause and effect.
Couldn’t that be considered perfection? We’re all in our current state of existence because of all of the events that occurred prior to this moment. I snore, I sometimes drool in my sleep, I probably don’t shower often enough… I’m a flawed human being, but everything that’s happened before now has led up to my snoring and drooling and lack of showering.
There’s no one else like me. No events that have occurred in the past or that will occur in the future will result in another me. (That’s probably for the best: it saves me the time and effort I’d need to hunt down and kill the other one.) I am the one and only Shawn Clarke Bakken. I’m just the way I’m supposed to be, a state of existence that includes all my flaws. I exist in a state of imperfect perfection.
And having written all of that, I wonder if God sounds anything like Billy Joel as He sits up in Heaven singing, “I love you just the way you are.”
