Just the other day, the Amazon delivery guy dropped off a stack of packages on my desk, and before I could sign anything, he replied, “You guys are all good.” He left before I had a chance to bring up total depravity.

Pamela Paul recently wrote a feature in The New York Times titled, “It’s All Good, and You’re Perfect.” What good Christian would take a pass at reading this? Not this one.

She wrote, “Recently I’ve been told that I’m perfect, something I’m perfectly aware I’ve never been nor ever will be. This generous assessment has come from strangers when I apologize for bumping into them and from the exceedingly cheerful salespeople at the store where my daughter shops for clothes. 'No, you’re perfect!' they’ll insist when I explain the need to rest my Gen X weariness on the fitting room floor where a modest 'No problem' would have sufficed.

“The urge toward pronounced perfection is annoyingly catchy. Almost against my will, I now respond to emails with a knee-jerk ‘Perfect!’ where I once would have said something more in line with the never mind sensibility of my generation. ‘Sounds good,’ for example, or ‘OK.’ “

I stand guilty as charged with those email replies.

We might have a “new affirmative language” as Paul describes, but that language isn’t doing much to help our stress, anxiousness or fears. Paul comments, “Most of us are willing to believe we are OK or that we are at least not a problem. It was easy to be no big deal. But who among us can live up to being all good, let alone perfect, all the time?”

When put this way, goodness and perfection sound like undesirable human attributes, but not so for the One who is good and perfect.

From the beginning, we discover that one of God’s favorite words is “good.” His creation was full of blessing and fruitfulness. It was perfect in design, especially those humans he made in his image. Everything was truly all good until it wasn’t.

God, however, remained good as lies and deception and accusations swirled around the garden. It was a good God who didn’t turn a cold shoulder to sin but walked in the garden calling for Adam and Eve. It was a good God who judged the sin that had broken his creation and a very good God who promised rescue.

It is a capricious god who loves his creatures one minute and turns his back on them the next. This is a god who is stand-offish and doesn’t want to clean up after his creatures’ mishaps and sins. This is not at all like our God who is “good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you” (Psalm 86:5), who holds back judgment, brings the outsider in and enters his creation full of grace and truth.

There are times, however, when God’s goodness and mercy make us uncomfortable, as it did with the prophet Jonah. His mission the second time around was the same as the first—call out against Nineveh—which Jonah did, because he knew God . . . was “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.” (Jonah 4:2) That’s why he fled to Tarshish in the first place. He knew God would forgive those awful, horrible, sinful Ninevites when they repented.

Just as God forgives anyone (yes, that anyone) who cries, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.” (Psalm 51:1)

We need to get comfortable with God’s goodness and mercy since they're going to follow us all the days of our lives, and then some.

And that's perfect with me.