“God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy”

I was struck by this quote while reading the CS Lewis book Mere Christianity. To me it reveals something about the nature of God. We know from Jesus’ admonition at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount “Be you therefore perfect, as also your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48) that God wants us to strive for perfection in our daily lives. But who can do this? We are human and we all fall short of the ideals of perfection that Jesus outlined in the Beatitudes and that we strive to achieve.

Many people get discouraged when they fail – they get down on themselves and they believe God does not love them because they cannot live up to his high standards. They develop a self-loathing; thinking that they will never be as good as others and so they give up trying to do better. This is a shame because the Christian faith teaches that God’s love is unconditional – nothing that you do will ever make God stop loving you. No matter how broken your relationship with God is today, he loves you. One of my Christian friends is fond of summarizing this belief with the line “God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it“.

God loves us, despite our flaws, but at the same time God loves us too much to let our relationship with him stay where it’s at. He wants our relationship with him to improve every day. That is why being a Christian is about change. It is a journey – not about where we are at, but where we are going. That is why the quote from CS Lewis gives me such hope. When he says “God is easy to please but hard to satisfy”, it comforts me to know that God is pleased with the smallest things I do today to make myself better. I don’t have to be perfect as long as I have that desire to do something every day to please him. And if I do that I believe he will help me to progress spiritually and develop a more intimate union with him that leads me to the perfection God wants for all of us.

There is a saying in the software and hardware engineering communities about “Perfection being the enemy of the Good“. That phrase is used by wise project managers as a warning to project team members not to get too fixated on developing hardware and software solutions that operate perfectly. They know, after much experience, that perfection is impossible to achieve and that the pursuit of it leads to project teams that do not deliver on time or on budget. They become skilled at recognizing when a solution is good enough and they realize from past experiences that there are always opportunities to make improvements to the product in future revisions.

That is a convenient way to think about our relationship with God too. We are all imperfect projects, but I am a better man today than I used to be – and with God’s help, I hope to be a better man tomorrow; and when I fail I am not going to use that as an excuse to give up and stop trying – because I know no matter how far I fall, God still loves me and that there is some small thing I can do every day that will please him.