Picture Perfect: When Life Doesn't Line Up (Paperback)

As a culture, we have a love-hate relationship with perfectionism. We reward perfectionists for their insistence on setting high standards and their tireless efforts to achieve them. But psychologists link perfectionism with a host of problematic behaviors ranging from eating disorders to risk aversion to workaholism. Perfectionism is a crushing burden that can leave us angry, anxious, and paralyzed.

Is the solution just to "lighten up"? In Picture Perfect, counselor and author Amy Baker challenges the popular notion that perfectionists need to lower their standards. After carefully examining Scripture and drawing from twenty-five years of counseling experience, Baker concludes, "The problem is not that our standards are too high and we just need to lighten up. The problem is that God's instruction to be perfect in Matthew 5:48 doesn't lead us to see how desperately we need him and drive us to our perfect Savior."

Helping readers to dig beneath the frustration of perfectionism, Baker exposes what drives our perfectionism and shows how Christ's perfection changes our motives, beliefs, desires, fears, anxieties, and goals. Readers will discover that only God's grace can transform the aching "not enough" of perfectionism into the overflowing abundance of faith.