Parents, Does Practice Really Make Perfect? *

Parents, does practice really make perfect? In Middle School, my mother thought it was a good idea for me to learn the trumpet… perhaps because this small skinny kid didn’t make the basketball team, and wasn’t big enough for football, or maybe because learning music helps your brain develop and she wanted well rounded kids. For whatever reason, I agreed and dreamed of maybe being the next Chuck Mangione or Louis Armstrong. The first day, I played it 'til my lips hurt. I learned that it takes a lot of practice to develop your embouchure, a fancy word for the way you hold your mouth so your lips vibrate right on the mouthpiece. A good embouchure with strong mouth muscles helps you sound like a trumpet player rather than an angry goose. When the band started, I seemed to do okay and the band director put me in the first chair. As the weeks progressed though, practice took second place to pick-up football, stickball, basketball, bike rides, and tennis with my friends. The thought of 30 minutes alone, sitting still with my trumpet was less than thrilling for my ADHD squirminess. However, my mother required it, saying “practice makes perfect.” I did it, but my heart wasn’t in it. In my mind I was outside scoring touchdowns with my suburban neighborhood sports posse. So, by the time the Christmas concert came around, I had moved steadily down the trumpet row, from 1st chair, to 2nd, to 3rd chair. I practiced, but I practiced missing notes, I didn’t practice the way the music was actually supposed to sound. It revealed that practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but “perfect practice makes perfect.”

In our Jesus following lives, sometimes we do stuff, like go to church, just so we can say we are practicing our faith, but it's more to check the box on the imaginary chart that convinces us we are a “good Christian person.” We feel slightly better about our lives, but we aren’t actually changed. In real life, rather than in our “Sunday-best” church life, we don’t always act like the One we belong to, we sometimes act like we used to before we belonged to Jesus. Peter the apostle, who used to struggle with acting like a Jesus follower sometimes, reminds us all that perfect practice makes perfect. He says, “As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.””(1 Peter 1:14–16 NIV) Peter certainly knows that we are still going to mess up and not always act like God’s people, who are set apart to represent Him on this planet, but the expectation is that the more we act like Jesus the more we become like Jesus and the less we act like we belong to the world. The more we perfectly practice acting like the One we belong to, the more we mature and become like Him. The people around us may notice and we have the opportunity to tell them about His wonderful love for us.

Hang in there people. God is glad to be with us. I’m praying for us all.