Several years ago I had an issue with one of my leaders in Children’s Ministry. It was over uniforms for a girls group. The group were supposed to be wearing them… but they weren’t even being offered uniforms by the group’s leadership. When I approached the leader I was told that the girls couldn’t afford the class A uniforms. I proposed that we go with a class B or even C option which would be a matching T-shirt with a sash for badges. This idea was whole-heartedly rejected by my leader.

Why? She wanted the class A uniforms and was willing to wait. It had been over 5 years at that point with no uniforms. It was time to admit something: that we were never going to have perfection. We needed to settle for (in her mind) something less… because it was better than nothing.

I’ve recently applied the lesson I learned from that experience to my marriage. I find that I have this perfect vision of what I want my family to be… and vision is a good thing don’t get me wrong. But it doesn’t make sense to stubbornly demand your vision at the expense of an obvious reality.

We may want our spouse to act or be a certain way. We have a vision for them… but what power do we have to change them? None! It may be time for us to adjust our ideas and accept something ‘less’ in order to ultimately get more from our relationships.

Our vision is probably not as ‘perfect’ anyway. We’re flawed people. Often our expectations of our spouses are based on overcompensations for some unmet need or emotional injury from our past. It’s ultimately very unfair to hold others to our own standards. It assumes to much in the first place… that we know exactly what everyone in the family needs to be happy.

Meanwhile, while we’re all waiting for that perfect dream… everyone’s miserable.

We can’t change people… but we can provide an atmosphere that instigates change. That atmosphere cannot be one of judgment and disapproval but rather one of unconditional love, understanding, selflessness and example setting. We aren’t settling for less… rather we’re improving our situation by accepting reality and making selfless, sacrificial adjustments from where we are now… which ultimately get is closer to where we need to be, rather than where we dreamed we’d be.