because really, it's all about jerry...

ignore the title.
anyway, even though scott said half of what i was going to say, i'm glad he did, and i'm going to say it again anyway because i feel like having one more stab at what i was trying to say in the first place, about love, perfection, and God's nature. so my last comment on my previous post will have a post of it's own, because love is always worth one more post.
i had started out using the concept of perfection most common to man, the one that most christians and most churches and particularly most people evaluating religion from just outside on the fringes use to determine God's worth through His people: that of sinlessness, the perfection of action and behaviour.
perfect love will not allow us to be perfect in this way. but it will do something greater: it will transcend our narrow concepts of perfection and make us more like the God we serve. perfect love allows us to love others even when they hurt us, even when we have to watch them hurt themselves in little ways that we can see but they can't. Perfect love allows us to love ourselves even when we fail ourselves, even when we see the sin inside that others don't know about, even when we think we should feel like hypocrites, even when we don't do what we know we're supposed to do as well as we're supposed to do it. And perfect love allows us to love God even when we're not sure how He could want love from us, how it could matter, and gives us a better understanding of how to love everyone else, because if he could sacrifice his son to us while we were enemies, then clearly, our lovability has nothing to do with His Love.
we will never be sinless. we may approximate it the best we can, but because God, who IS Love, is the standard, we will still be prone to fall short of the absolute ideal. we have love, but we are not love. yet.
so what we truly need to understand (as i stray further and further into the dreaded realm of complete hypocrisy) is that it doesn't matter that we will still sin. God paid for those sins, they're already water under the bridge, or blood under the foundation of the world, or mud and filth under snow. God sees the snow, not the mud underneath. not because he CAN'T, but because he CHOOSES not to. now we need to make the same choice.
perfect love.
for everyone.
if i could ask for anything, it might be for this.