Devotional Message

"Is 99.9 % Good Enough?"

The Holy Writings say, "See, I lay down in Jerusalem a Stone of great worth, worth far more than any amount of money. Anyone who puts his trust in Him will not be ashamed."1 Peter 2:6

I had an old friend who has passed on now who was fond of saying, "Good enough for government work!" Of course when he said that it was after he built something he knew was not quite as good as it should have been but he figured it would suffice. Once he built a car garage that was just slightly imperfect when he set the plumb line according to the cornerstone he had laid. He knew it wasn't 100% perfect but it was his place so what difference did it make? When he was done, he noticed that the garage had a slight lean to it. Oh well - who cared? But one day the garage fell over and collapsed under its own weight. A tribute to imperfection you might say.

I believe that there are a lot of things all of us do in life that are slightly imperfect. We have become accustomed to doing things that we know aren't good enough and we simply shrug and let them go. Yet when others do things just slightly imperfect in our behalf, we become upset and we complain. Would you say that 99.9% was good enough? You would think that a slight imperfection wouldn't really make a difference in the long run. Or would it? Well consider the following; If 99.9% was an acceptable standard for everyone from now on - then …

Two million documents will be lost by the IRS this year.
22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.
1,314 phone calls will be misplaced by telecommunication services every minute.
12 babies will be given to the wrong parents each day.
268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year.
14,208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year.
103,260 income tax returns will be process incorrectly this year.
2,488,200 books will be shipped in the next 12 months with the wrong cover.
5,517,200 cases of soft drinks produced in the next 12 months will be flatter than a bad tire.
Two plane landings daily at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago will be unsafe.
3,056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.
18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.
291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.
880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips.
$9,690 will be spent today, tomorrow, next Thursday, and every day in the future on defective, often unsafe sporting equipment.
55 malfunction automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12 months.
20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.
114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.
$761,900 will be spent in the next 12 months on tapes and compact discs that won't play.
107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day today.
315 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language will turn out to be misspelled. From: InSight, Syncrude Canada Ltd., Communications Division Communicator, p. 6.

Well you get the picture don't you? But everyone continues to say, "Nobody's perfect!" Since none of us are infallible, doesn't it make perfect sense to rely on someone who is? Christ is our chief cornerstone upon whom we can build our hopes, our dreams and confidence on. Trust in Him and He will help you overcome the imperfections we find everywhere in life; Hebrews 4:15 For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin. Nobody's perfect - except for Him of course!