An Imperfect Woman

Letting Go of the Need to Have It All Together

Kim Hyland

• Publisher: Baker Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780801075162
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493408399
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Women are bombarded with ideas of perfection--and tips for how to achieve it--every day. From her work to her looks to her parenting, today's modern woman is expected to strive to be picture perfect in every way. As a result, calls for authenticity and imperfection are on the rise. Yet, deep down, most of us still want to achieve perfection. Why?

The desire to be perfect, says Kim Hyland, is actually a God-given urge. After all, we were made for Eden. But there is a difference between perfection and perfectionism, which is our attempt to achieve perfection on our own, by our own strength, and for our own purposes--the original temptation in the Garden. In this freeing book, Hyland offers women a stirring manifesto for acknowledging their limitations and embracing the perfection of God through his grace. This is a book for every woman who gives 110% and yet feels shame when one little thing goes wrong.

Part 1
The Gospel’s Proclamation

Eden’s Redemption

two trees stand before me

one I know well

its fruit luscious, heady, and ripe

the scent of knowledge, vanity, pride

my ancestors knew it

their lineage sustained and appetites sated

with its fallow fruit and empty promises

the knowledge of good and evil

the hope of immortality

to be like God

the same old lie

its deceit as fresh as the day

why is man so simple?

fig leaves make pitiful clothes

my nakedness and shame refuse to be covered

scrambling, dropping, hiding

(a lot like those dreams of being naked in public)

but simpletons love their leaves

their futile efforts to mask weakness and failure

refusing to acknowledge their desperate need

refusing to accept

only blood can cover sin

footsteps come near

questions too

“why do you hide from my presence?”

accusations abound

excuses fly

everyone else must be at fault

to bear the blame would be a burden that would crush

I know the sentence

he did not lie when he said

“you shall surely die”

so why does he fashion clothes to cover my shame?

from what cloth do they come?

skins?

death has come

blood does cover

but it is not mine

this blood is from another

a foreshadow stretching long

across ages and time

from earth’s creation . . . to Gethsemane . . . to this moment

the garden is not so far from here

its drama repeated in every mortal life

to listen to the deceiver

or to believe my maker

yes, the garden is near

but the verdict, it has changed

for my advocate spoke and took all my blame

his hands bear the scars of my heart’s newfound healing

he invites me to walk

to taste of the other

this fruit not forbidden

but offered freely

“come and eat”

he says

“of the Tree of Life”

1
The Gospel, a Perfect Fit for Your Reality

I will reject spiritual perfectionism
and embrace gospel grace.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Jesus (Luke 4:18–19)

Amy Howard was my best friend in first grade. She lived close by, and I can still see the path to her house in my memory. Out the sliding back doors, across our postage-stamp townhouse lawn, through the gate, past the playground, up the hill, across the street, and I’d arrive. We would sing into hairbrush microphones in her basement as we dreamed up plans for our rock band. I don’t remember if we had a name for our up-and-coming band, but I do remember our signature song! It was “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch” (aka “I Can’t Help Myself” by The Four Tops), and it was going to make us famous.

Amy’s mom was cool. She encouraged our dreams of fame and even joined our band practice on occasion. My fuzzy memories of her are all positive. That is until Amy told me her cool mom didn’t believe in God. I was devastated.

If you don’t believe in God, you go to hell. Period.

This was the first and most important fact in my nascent theological arsenal. I remember feeling a sense of panic that quickly turned into anxious efforts to fix this dreadful problem—a mental and emotional state I’d come to know well.

“She has to believe in God, Amy.”

“Well, she doesn’t,” replied Amy passively.

“But she’ll go to hell!”

“No, she won’t!” This time not so passively.

And my pleading continued.

I don’t have any memories of Amy or her cool, atheist, hell-bound mom after that. But I remember an overwhelming sense of helplessness and sorrow. I couldn’t fix it.

A couple years later, I heard the gospel for the first time. The message truly was good news for my passionate, do-good, striving, seven-year-old soul. It was great news! I’d found the sure path to goodness, God, and heaven.

A Place of Power

Our salvation is a powerful moment in our lives—the most powerful. We receive this gift, the gospel of grace, that literally brings us to life and equips us to live every day for the rest of our lives. The gospel proclaims that as we humble our hearts, we receive forgiveness for our sins. As children of God, we’re promised his sovereign care, provision, and peace.

While salvation is a free gift of God, the gospel calls us to a life of sacrifice—and even suffering—but always hope. Its truth becomes our standard, and we are equipped for the spiritual battle we’ve always fought anyway. The difference is now we are on the offense—and winning side.

The gospel comes with power! Its power is revealed through our stories and grand, eternal destinies designed by our Father for each one of us.

This gospel story of God’s great love and grace through Jesus and its proclamation, promise, price, and power are at center stage when we first receive the gift of salvation. The gospel of grace has all our attention.

And our enemy Satan knows if we stay in that place of deep truth, dependence, and reliance on our Father—this deep awareness at the foot of the cross of his grace and our sinfulness, the forgiveness we receive, and the love exchange that takes place there, that place focused on God’s grace—we will become a real threat in the spiritual battle. So he goes to task creating distractions, counterfeits, and whatever he can to get our eyes off grace.

My Story

I was raised in a churchgoing home by first-generation Christians. My father, a handsome Puerto Rican from Brooklyn, and my mother, a homecoming queen country girl from rural Pennsylvania, met in a laundromat in Washington, DC, in the late sixties. They quickly fell in love and married, and soon after, I joined them.

Dad had heard the gospel at the historic 1957 Billy Graham Crusade in New York City. He was twelve years old, and he went forward when Billy gave the altar call. Mom’s encounter with the gospel was humbler but no less effective. She told stories of listening to her Pentecostal grandmother sing hymns on her porch in Hazard, Kentucky. Great-Grandma was sowing song-seeds of love and truth in the soil of my mother’s young heart—seeds that would take root, grow, and in time supply fruit that would feed my faith.

Along with my parents, many loving and imperfect people molded my understanding of God and the Bible. But even in the midst of a Christian home, church involvement, private school, youth group, and Christian college, I came to equate pleasing with love. Of course, my misunderstanding carried over into my relationship with God. I would hide from him when I wasn’t performing well and come to him only when I believed I was worthy of his approval and love.

I was distracted from grace, to say the least. I’d fallen for subtle yet destructive lies. My eyes were focused intently on my own beleaguered efforts to perfect myself. Perfectionism is defined as (1) any of various doctrines holding that religious, moral, social, or political perfection is attainable; (2) a personal standard, attitude, or philosophy that demands perfection and rejects anything less.1 I’d forgotten the gospel message.

Being the fixer and planner that I was, I began strategizing for my future early on. I would do this thing right! I was ambitious through high school, graduating at sixteen and going off to college the following fall. I found my knight in shining armor, Jeff, and we were married when I was eighteen. I finished college at twenty, and our first son, Joshua, was born nine months later. My plans were coming together. I was determined to create a godly home and to continue to make myself worthy of God’s love and blessings.

One child after another came rapid fire—a second boy, a girl, two more boys, and after deciding we were done having children, another boy four years later. As each child joined our family, I decided not only to carry the responsibility of my own sanctification but also to take charge of sanctifying my children’s souls as well.

The years flew by, as they tend to do. I was living my dream, and I knew it. But why was it so hard? We homeschooled, Jeff was an elder, I taught Bible studies, I kept a ridiculously clean house for a family of eight. And I yelled a whole lot at my kids. I was a Bible-toting, churchgoing, song-singing, hard-striving young wife and mother.

For all of my striving, we were doing . . . okay. I was stressed out all the time, my oldest son and I argued constantly, and our second son was running away. But we were okay, because we homeschooled, my husband was an elder, I taught Bible studies, and the house was clean most of the time. And Emily.

Emily said, “Yes, ma’am,” taught Bible studies to her little friends in the neighborhood, helped me all the time, was a leader and example among her peers, and loved Jesus wholeheartedly.

She also had nowhere to go with the reality of her sin. Emily had embraced the same striving, try-hard life as her mother and was a really “good” girl. When it came to my only daughter, I felt successful.

Until the day I walked into her room unexpected and discovered Emily was cutting. It looked like a cat had attacked her stomach. Had you told me that my sweet, little thirteen-year-old daughter was cutting, I would have said you were crazy. Emily said, “Yes, ma’am,” taught Bible studies, and truly loved Jesus wholeheartedly! Cutting wasn’t part of my plan.

We went on to discover that Emily was deeply depressed and had an eating disorder. My world crumbled. It crumbled not because I loved Em more than her brothers, but because I felt like she was the one I was getting it right with, and now I’d failed with her too. And I gave up. I kept going through the motions, but my heart wasn’t in it. How could I work so stinking hard and still fail so profoundly as a mom?

The helplessness and lack of control I felt were paralyzing. As a mother, you will do anything to protect your children. But what do you do when their enemy is themselves? My mind was frantic, but every strategy and fix I could conceive came up to a dead end. I would lie in bed at night begging God to protect Emily from herself. Begging him to fix us. My heart was breaking. What I didn’t know was that in my desperation God was breaking the back of perfectionism in my life. My life’s greatest failure would become the means of my freedom.

In his wisdom, love, and mercy, God had begun to sabotage my strategies.

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)

The word translated “abide” in this verse is the Greek word meno. It means “to remain; not to depart; to continue. To remain as one; not to become another or different.”2 At the moment of salvation, we literally become one with Christ. I don’t know that I think of myself as that integrated, that I am one with Christ and therefore I’m not to become another or different.

Our family lives on seven acres tucked into the side of a mountain. A couple years ago, my son Ben and I were out hiking. As we walked through our woods, I began to notice places where dead trees had fallen over and landed in the crook of a live tree and, after some years, had literally become a part of the living tree. It was fascinating to see these odd branches sticking out of what seemed like two trees, but on closer examination I could see how they’d actually become one as the tree that was alive grew around the dead tree.

That is a picture of us!...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• An Imperfect Woman’s Manifesto
• Part 1: The Gospel’s Proclamation
• Part 2: The Gospel’s Promise
• Part 3: The Gospel’s Price
• Part 4: The Gospel’s Power
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Back Ads
• Back Cover