IN SEARCH OF ORDINARY EXCELLENCE

Excellence has become our new ideal. I’ve been depressed ever since. I just can’t seem to muster enough wonderfulness to measure up.

In Search of Excellence sits on a shelf by my bed for inspirational reading. A book that motivates millions, it was given to me by a friend who, I think, meant well. I bogged down in the third chapter.

The idea generally seems to be that we are to do the best, buy the best, have the best, be the best; that we work to deserve that superb rating; that we attain, excel, get to the top.

What red-blooded achiever could argue against such an exalted theme? Me. I’ve got to.

It just hasn’t worked for me. I’ve tried, but I can’t pull it off. I set out to be excellent and end up confused and frustrated.

One of my problems is, “Excellent compared to whom?” I can’t think of anything I do but what somebody I know does it better. Joe is more disciplined to exercise. Bob plays better golf, Hymman is more organized, Powell sings better, G. L. tells funnier stories, and everyone on our block keeps up his front yard better. And those are just the local comparisons.

Television puts excellence in every living room, so we see national or world best. Pity the local preacher whose flock stacks his sermons against the nation’s finest communicators. Or the hometown soprano who feels she must compete with the extraordinarily gifted and trained television singers.

If excellence comes by comparison, by excelling among my peers, I quit. Ordinary is my ceiling. I find “the judge of what is excellent” as another problem. Excellent by whose standards? Esquire’s? Business Week’s? Or the Word of God’s?

I know what a Miss America looks like, but how about a Miss Kingdom of God? Hard to see, isn’t it? By the world’s standard, once again, I may end up ordinary. Should I care? In some cases, as a plaque in my office says, IT DON’T MATTER.

A final troublesome aspect of excellence is that we can get so hooked on the idea of excelling that when we realize we can’t be number one, we quit in despair. If I can’t be Billy Graham, I won’t say anything publicly about God. If I can’t win the Boston Marathon, I won’t even enjoy a morning jog. Nonsense. My efforts may be classified as ordinary, but they are my efforts, and I’ll have the excitement and challenge of making them, thank you.

So now, with tongue somewhat in cheek, I’ve challenged the quest for excellence and best. Is this the end of the matter? No, because God designed us to do things and to care about the quality of the doing. I may scrap the idea of being “world’s best,” but never the goal of being “my best.”

In vacation Bible school, kids prayed at dismissal time: “I will do the best I can with what I have where I am for Jesus’ sake today.” If this is what excellence means, I can live with it. Ordinarily.

– C. David Gable

City Center Assembly of God

Fresno, California

Adapted with permission from Pentecostal Evangel, June 7, 1987.

Leadership Spring 1988 p. 86