Think of the beauty of a simple circle, easily visualized. Now draw a line across the circle, passing through the center. There is nothing mysterious or obscure about these two shapes.
How is best to define the proportion of the curved complete circle (the circumference) to the straight line through the middle (the diameter)?
The units we use to measure can make the difference between exactly articulating this relationship in a single syllable, and never quite reaching it, despite an eternal pursuit extending on forever with no pattern or resolution.
If we use numeric digits, familiar to the most basic methods of mathematics, we will never arrive.
We must choose another way, wholly transcendent in its precision and perfect power to describe.
By definition, the ratio is explained best by employing a tiny symbol, properly assigned as the singularly adequate descriptor, pronounced "pie":
π
This Greek letter is uniquely appropriate to define the difference between a circle’s circumference and its diameter, precisely because we’ve chosen it to represent that ratio, in absolute perfection.
To translate the ratio into numeric digits is to force us to accept some uncertainty, best expressed as the irrational number 3.141592653589793… etc.
To use this number in calculations demands that we round it off to an acceptable approximation.
The curious ratio can be perfectly defined, if we rise above our mechanistic need to define it according to familiar units, such as numbers.
Insisting on our own measuring units, we will fail. Accepting another way, we can succeed.
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Jesus commands in the Sermon on the Mount that we are to be perfect, even as our Father in Heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5: 48; See also 3 Nephi 12: 48; Doc. & Cov. 67: 13)
Using our worldly measures, defined by a fault-finding, focused obsession with errors and defects, we will be perpetually prevented from proper perfection.
As education is the process for becoming educated, perfection is the process by which we become perfected. Perfection is the process, not only the end result.
I've come to believe that for us, perfect doesn't mean "without defect," but instead "whole and complete."
We can be whole and complete, even while struggling with failures.
We can be perfect, though we may look or feel different from typical expectations of perfection.
If we are a true follower of righteousness, and always rise up after a fall, we are perfect.
If we always repent after we sin, and become a little better by our repentance, we are perfect.
If we never stop adding another stone of strength to our castle of character, we are perfect. (See Job 1: 1)
Of course, we shouldn't expect to be just like our Heavenly Father while here in a fallen world, subject to the frailties of mortality. Our foolish fixation on a false idea of perfection can ironically keep us from progressing towards it.
But like a diameter being compared to a circumference, we can and should accept different units to measure our relationship to Him.
What does God use to measure our perfection?
How can we gauge our standing before Him, and more accurately compare ourselves to a proper standard?
Because of our greatly limited capacity for righteousness, we must exchange our imperfect measuring units for those He uses to define our perfection, by His miraculous condescension to us.
These units He has defined, by His covenants with us.
Use them.
Enter into as many covenants with God as are available to you. Keep them.
You can keep these covenants perfectly, even if it still requires regular repentance.
Don't keep yourself bound down under your own sense of perfectionism.
Find yourself perfected in Him, and blessed to see yourself the way He sees you.
Consider this, the final thought presented in the Book of Mormon, Moroni's dying words:
"Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.
And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot."
Moroni 10: 32-33
See also:
Be Ye Therefore Perfect—Eventually, by Jeffrey R. Holland
I’m Not Perfect … Yet, by Joëlle Spijkerman