Recently, while interacting in a listserv discussion group of professionals someone corrected me on something, and I responded by saying: "How nice to be imperfect." It was sarcastic.

I did not feel nice, and I was not happy to be corrected; however, someone else on the list responded to what I had written affirming that yes, indeed, it was nice to be imperfect. That puzzled me. What could be nice about that? Was it the freedom people might feel not to have to live up to a standard, not to have to perform according to someone else's sense of "the way it should be?" I could not figure it out.

We are finite. Limited. I get that. We are made in the image of God, and we have some of His attributes, but we have those attributes only to a point. For instance, God has the capacity to love to an infinite degree, without measure, but we do not. Our love comes in dribbles and mixed with all kinds of other motives and behaviours that makes it diluted in quality. We have the capacity for mercy and the capacity to be true or faithful, because we are made in the image of God and He has communicated these traits of His to us in the creation, but we do not share in God's attribute of infinity; so, while God is merciful and true without measure, Adam and Eve's capacity for mercy and faithfulness was limited, and our capacity is now limited and marred.

This limitation of ours, this finitude, was by design. It was not an accident, and it was not just a product of the fall; so, when God was finished with creation and He proclaimed His work "good", that included the fact that human beings are limited.

Perhaps we were created perfect even though limited. After all, how could anything created be infinite in the first place; yet, many things are made with a limited scope just precisely to fit a particular purpose. Thus, the fact that we are creatures makes us finite. We are the work of God's creativity; so, perhaps we were created perfect to fit a design and to take our place on the stage of His creation for a purpose. I believe that is so, and I believe that design and purpose lingers in our being; it's what compels us to investigate the world in which we live so as to understand it and to manage it. God gave us the world, and after he pronounced His creation good, he commissioned human beings as the foresters to husband and manage the world, to have dominion. Environmentalists will say that we have done a lousy job at that, but the original purpose still shines through the corruption that makes us want to have dominion at the expense of almost everything and everyone else.

Our state is a fallen state, what the Bible teaches to be a state of sin. Jesus described us as evil in this fallen state (Luke 11:13) when He was teaching His followers about prayer. He said: "If you, being evil, know how to give your children good things, how much more does your heavenly Father know how to give good things when you ask Him?" (My paraphrase.)

Is all this what makes me make mistakes and forget names? Is this why I misjudge the distance between my bumper and the next car? Is this why my vision is blurred up close? God made me limited, but did God make me imperfect?

Many people would say that sickness and flaw, failure and imperfection, as exemplified in the kinds of things mentioned just above, are the result of sin, that the whole of creation was marred in the fall of humankind. What is the difference between evil and sin or between sin and imperfection? Are these all synonyms and caused by the same, terrible event?

Psychology in general, and gestalt psychotherapy in particular, has no moral standard by which to judge a person's imperfection. However, every mental health professional does have a sense of what makes a person mentally healthy or disordered, and that standard could be one way of estimating a person's imperfection. For instance, most psychologists recognise personality disordered people as having rigid flaws that interfere with functioning successfully interpersonally with others. Among those, the antisocial person, and the sociopathic antisocial person, is particularly troublesome. These are the people who lack a conscience and who take advantage of others without remorse, in many cases just because they can.

In gestalt therapy a person is deemed healthier if he or she is able to respond with spontaneity to novel circumstances, form what gestalt therapists call solid figures of interest, and pursue those interests to fulfillment by making contact in the environment with others. Just as Adam and Eve hid from God in the garden when they became ashamed, gestalt therapy recognises a breaking of contact, a deliberate interruption of contact-to constitute a fall from the grace of relationship and healthy function.

In addition, in gestalt therapy there is a law of pragnanz in which people are believed to do their best to achieve the simplest possible form and solution to any given challenge. In extolling the simplest possible, it accepts that in any given situation, there may not be a rigid and objective standard to judge the actions of all people. In the midst of human imperfection, they may be achieving the best possible, while giving their best effort, and that is good enough.

Come to think of it, maybe that is what the person on the listserv discussion group was getting at. Nice to be imperfect, indeed. To that I would simply add, nice to be forgiven and reconciled to God as well.