Picture Perfect: When Life Doesn't Line Up

Picture Perfect: When Life Doesn't Line UpAs a culture, we have a love hate relationship with perfectionism. We reward perfectionists for their insistence on setting high standards and their tireless efforts to achieve them. But psychologists link perfectionism with a host of problematic behaviors ranging from eating disorders to risk aversion to workaholism. Perfectionism is a crushing burden that can leave us angry, anxious, and paralyzed. Is the solution just to lighten up? In Picture

As a culture, we have a love-hate relationship with perfectionism. We reward perfectionists for their insistence on setting high standards and their tireless efforts to achieve them. But psychologists link perfectionism with a host of problematic behaviors ranging from eating disorders to risk aversion to workaholism. Perfectionism is a crushing burden that can leave us angry, anxious, and paralyzed. Is the solution just to “lighten up”? In Picture Perfect, counselor and author Amy Baker challenges the popular notion that perfectionists need to lower their standards. After carefully examining Scripture and drawing from 25 years of counseling experience, Baker concludes, “The problem is not that our standards are too high and we just need to lighten up. The problem is that God’s instruction to be perfect in Matthew 5:48 doesn’t lead us to see how desperately we need him and drive us to our perfect Savior.” Helping readers to dig beneath the frustration of perfectionism, Baker exposes what drives our perfectionism and shows how Christ’s perfection changes our motives, beliefs, desires, fears, anxieties, and goals. Readers will discover that only God’s grace can transform the aching “not enough” of perfectionism into the overflowing abundance of faith.

Publisher: New Growth Press
Type: Paperback
ISBN: 9781939946379

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Amy Baker, PhD, is the Ministry Resource Director at Faith Church (Lafayette, IN); Director of Counseling for Vision of Hope, a faith-based residential treatment program; Instructor and counselor at Faith Biblical Counseling Ministries; a council member of the Biblical Counseling Coalition: and the author of Getting to the Heart of Friendships as well as several counseling minibooks. She and her husband Jeff have two children.

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"Amy Baker has written a skillful and insightful book to help the perfectionist. Her illustrations are good, and the Scriptures that she uses are practical and powerful. As an exhorter, Amy uses her God-given gift to help turn the perfectionist from self-centered introspection to God-centered praise. I thank God for this book and Amy's heart for God's glory. I look forward to using it in my counseling ministry." Martha Peace, Biblical counselor; author of The Excellent Wife