The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

The following homily was delivered by Courtney Wilder at a Lenten service at her home congregation, Augustana Lutheran Church in Omaha, Nebraska. The homily format for the Lenten season is based on the National Public Radio series "This I Believe," where listeners record personal statements of belief.

This is what I believe: that the perfect is the enemy of the good. I wrote this on a piece of paper and taped it above my desk when I was writing my dissertation, I repeat it to my students as they begin big projects, and I think that it is a useful guide for human activity in general, and Christian activities in particular.
The perfect is tantalizing. The perfect is beautiful, and inspiring, and unattainable, and the very unattainablity of the perfect can sink us into despair. Especially when we think about our actions, and how we might best follow the instructions of Jesus to love our neighbors and care for the poor and let justice roll down like a river – the perfect is tempting, but overwhelming.
I was thinking about this recently when purchasing a few items to go into the midwife kits that Augustana folks assembled for shipment overseas. I don’t have baby clothes to hand down anymore, so I went to Target and picked up some small hats and shirts to be included in the kits. As I was choosing them I stopped to think about the individual babies whose mothers, perhaps pregnant even now, will benefit from these kits. The kits were modest – no ultrasound, no Doppler, none of the fancy prenatal vitamins I remember taking – but infinitely useful. Basic items that any midwife would be glad to have at hand during a delivery – cloth for bandages, clothes to keep the newborn baby warm and comfortable, washcloths for cleanup, other medical supplies.
This is not a perfect enterprise, in the sense that no one kit will solve the problem of women’s health in the developing world, no one kit will bring a family out of poverty or ensure that the midwife has everything she needs to keep critically ill mothers and babies alive. And yet, for the midwife who receives the kits – they will allow her to spend less of her own money on supplies, perhaps to charge less to the families she serves. It will be an affirmation that her work is valuable and supported, that people care about her mothers and her babies. For the babies born into the world with at least one hat and shirt, the kids will provide warmth and comfort. For the mothers, the kits will help to ensure that they survive their deliveries, and that their babies do as well. Standing in the aisle at Target picking out tiny baby hats, I hoped that somewhere mothers will have a sense that people in the world love and care about them and their families.
This is what I believe: that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Those kits were good. They did not solve all the world’s problems in one fell swoop, they did not address the inequalities in global healthcare or the serious problem of FGM and its implications for maternal mortality in childbirth, they did not prevent the transmission of HIV, but they were good. We can aspire to perfection, to an ideal where every mother has a safe and gentle birth, where every baby is born into a family prepared to feed, clothe and educate it, so that that boy or girl can then participate in a society where every adult has full and meaningful employment and the ruling authorities are peaceful, wise and just. But there is a lot of ground to cover between here and there.
The trick is to neither stop all action in despair, because we cannot achieve the perfect, nor to stop once we have accomplished a small, individual good. This is the immeasurable gift of belonging to a congregation, and to a larger church body. I am so grateful to be a member of this congregation. I’ve read a lot about childbirth, I have a lot of opinions about various approaches to delivering babies, I’ve had any number of conversations with friends and family about birth, but I’ve never, until this recent project, sent supplies to midwives in other parts of the world. This is a good project, one that I wouldn’t have come to on my own, one that wouldn’t have occurred to me. It has given me something new to think about, and teach about. There are other actions I can take in support of women in the developing world, and because I participated in this good task I am reminded to seek them out. I am grateful to the people in our congregation and in other congregations who organized this project.
We have very clear instructions in the Bible to care for the poor, to love our neighbors, to let justice roll down like a river. I am so happy that I had the chance to follow Jesus’ instructions and contribute to the midwife kits. It is a good project.