By Cindy Koch –

I love Pinterest. Beautiful pictures, brilliant ideas, happy inspiring thoughts, delicious recipes, perfect outfits. I can sit for hours dreaming about my next home renovation project, browsing thousands of colors, ideas, and styles. I add to my collection of carefully and thoughtfully titled pin boards so that I have a little stash of my hopes and dreams safely remembered in cyberspace. This is the virtual existence of my perfect life.

And then I close my laptop, and I can clearly see the pile of dishes, stacks of laundry, and peeling paint. My beautiful children are muddy from playing in the dirt with the dog. My teenagers are quoting less than inspiring phrases. I’m out of butter and lemons, again, for that delicious dinner I was going to make. My life is not organized neatly into little manageable pin boards; it’s kind of a mess.

I think most people realize this; life is not a perfect Pinterest dream.  But it’s not cause to boycott the whole industry. I tried to make a cute cake for my son’s birthday, and it looks like a blood sucking zombie. No biggie. It turns out that most of these mishaps are pretty funny. We’ve all tried a little, and failed a lot, and moved along to the next idea.

But Pinterest is a little like pornography. It becomes addictive. It inspires the imagination in pleasurable ways. And then it raises the bar on our expectations of our actual life. I turn away from the magical screen and I am instantly depressed with the tangible reality of my day. I begin to recognize that my life is totally imperfect. I begin to see myself in another dimension: living a cleaner, cuter, more put together life. So, of course, I’ll get my fix on a couple more pins.

Why don’t we just avoid the idolatrous sin? That should keep us in the clear, right? That is, until we begin to focus on another time-gobbling activity that pulls us away from our family, our work, and our daily bread. The downward spiral of un-appreciation for what has been given to us by God to survive the day becomes more apparent with every new virtual trend. And we can’t avoid the distractions. We will always want more.

Like any other sin that takes over our lives, we cannot overcome it. Sure we can try. We can transfer the obsession to another attempt doomed to fail. We can focus on our children. We can focus on our marriage. We can focus on our work. We can focus on our community service. We can focus on our self-image. We can focus on obtaining that elusive perfect life, and we will have many more shocking disappointments.

Our God does not want the sacrifices of our Pinterest attention or the sacrifice of our narcissistic selfies. He desires a broken and contrite heart. (Psalm 51:17) And when we even fail there, He is broken for us, too. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

We won’t escape our problems by challenging ourselves to do better. These living disappointments are actually gifts that God has given you today! These moments of suffering point us to Christ, the one who has reconciled all of our Pinterest fails. You have discovered how very far from perfect you are, but you know that He is perfect. You have seen that your hands create a mess and pain, but His hands have created our beautiful world and your beautiful life. You experience sadness, sin, and even death, but He says “I forgive you and will raise you up.”

So, shall we go on pinning so that grace may abound? By no means! We are dead to sin but alive in Christ. We are free.