He went on: "When I was young, I thought I had to be perfect for people to love me. I thought that if I ever did something wrong, their love would be withdrawn. So every time I did something wrong. I would make excuses. I would lie. I would try to find someone else to blame. I didn't realize what an unpleasant person I became when I acted that way. I thought it was my imperfection, not my Defensiveness that turned people off. But lying here in the hospital-sick and cranky and dying, but feeling God's presence in the doctors and nurses who try help me, and the friends and family who come to visit me-I finally learn that you don't have to be perfect to be worth loving. I only wish I had known that sooner"

I thought I had to be perfect. Where did so many of us get that notion? Did we get it from parents who hoped we would make up for the empty spaces in their own lives? From teachers who took for granted everything we did right but focused on every mistake? From religious leaders who told us how Adam and Eve broke one rule and were punished forever?

Do women get that message of protection from movies and fashion ads, featuring actresses and models with figures they can't hope to match? Do men get it from relentless pressures to sell more, to earn more, and form a society that makes fun of the losers in the super bowl for being only the second best football team in the world?

I think of the organizers of the national spelling bee, who, every year at the finals, have to provide a "comfort room" where children who spelled hundred of words perfectly can go to cry, throw things and be comforted by their parents when they finally made one mistake. The hundreds of correct words are forgotten as they feel like failures for having gone one work wrong. (I can relate to that. To this day I can see the word judgment without remembering it was the word I got wrong in the finals of my elementary school spelling bee 50 years ago.)

I don't believe in a God who looks for reasons to punish people for being less than perfect. I think it is bad religion to teach that, just as it is a mistake for parents to be excessively disappointed every time the child makes a mistake. I believe in a God who knows how complicated human life is, how difficult it is to be a good person at all times, and who expects not perfect life a an honest effort at a good one.

For me, the biblical story of the Garden of Eden is the story of how Adam and Eve had to learn that there are such things as Good and Evil. Of how they came to understand that certain things are wrong. As a result, human life is so complicated that even the best people can get everything right every time.

Why did God make human lives so complicated? Maybe because god loves goodness more than perfection and appreciates our struggles to achieve good as morally preferable to beings programmed to be perfect. If god could not love flawed, imperfect people, God would be very lonely, because imperfect people are the only ones around, and if we can't accept and love people with all their imperfection, we condemn ourselves to loneliness as well.

We need to stop blaming our parents for having made mistakes in raising us. They were amateurs when it came to raising children-a task where even experts don't always know the answers. In their loving, faltering way, they gave us something more valuable than a perfect childhood. They taught us what a complicated thing love is, what a challenges it is to love and raise children. And as we grow and become parents ourselves, we grow to appreciate that.

We owe our children the right to make mistakes and to learn from them. When our children were first learning to walk; taking tentative steps and falling down, We didn't scold them for being clumsy. We praised them for trying to do something new and challenging. We can do our children no bigger favor than to maintain that attitude as they grow up. I have visited classrooms where children were so tense for fear of giving a wrong answer, so fearful of being scorned for asking a question, that there was no possibility of any learning going on.

The story of George Washington and cherry tree may be an outdated fable, but the point of the story is still valid: our children need to know that we will not stop loving them anytime they do wrong. Without that reassurance, we don't teach them to be perfect: we teach them to be liars.

We need to understand that the essence of married love is not romance but forgiveness. I once heard a women described how she and her husband had arrived an hour late for party, because he had refused to stop and as for directions. A young single woman in the group said, "if some guy did that to me, at stop the car, get out, take a cab home and never speak to him again." I had to restrain myself from saying to her, "Have you no quirks that would drive someone crazy if he didn't love you enough to put up with them?" Romantic love needs to deny and overlooked flaws. But mature love sees the faults in ourselves and in the ones we love and is capable loving flawed people.

We need to give ourselves permission to be human, to try and to stumble, to be momentarily week and feel shame but to overcome that shame with moments of strength, courage, and generosity. We need to learn to define ourselves not by our worst moments of our more typical ones. Life is not a spelling bee where one mistake wipes out all things we've done right. Life is not a test for which the passing grade is 100 percent and anything less is a failure. May be when it comes to building bridges and space capsules, one mistake renders the entire project worthless. But life is so much more complicated than building bridges or space capsules that we can't expect ourselves or anyone else to do it error-free.

Life is like the baseball season, Where even the best teams lose at least a third of its games and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. The goal is not to win every game but to win more than you lose, and if you do that often enough in the end you may find you have won it all.

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