Noise in Spirituality

Matthew 5:48-"Be ye therefore perfect"
President Lorenzo Snow : "Do not expect to become perfect at once.  If you do, you will be disappointed.  Be better today than you were yesterday, and be better tomorrow than you are today.  Thus continue to be a little better day by day."

I love President Snow's explanation of the Lord's command for us to be perfect.  I definitely agree with the principle, but I do believe the wording can still be a little too disappointing for me.  I think the phrase "day by day" is still a little too immediate.  At least for me personally, I believe that when I compare today and yesterday, too often I could say that today I am not as good as I was yesterday.  I feel like it helps me to zoom out a little bit more, to be a little better month by month, or better this year than you were last year.

I feel like my view point is best understood as an analogy with data analysis.  When analyzing data, often you are looking for trends.  These trends are best seen when taking the entire data set as a whole into consideration.  "Noise" is what you call the random up and down scatter when you look too closely at a specific range of data.  I feel like sometimes I am analyzing my life data but I am only seeing the noise.  Below is a zoomed in plot of data that is clearly too oscillatory to determine if it is going upwards, downwards or staying the same.  I compare this to how often in our lives we see ourselves on too narrow of a perspective so we might say "well yesterday was better than the day before but today is worse...who knows if I'm getting better?!"

 If I can only remember how I have been for the past few days, weeks, months, however long I will usually see a lot of up and down moments and I might be tempted to say that I haven't made any progress.  In fact, sometimes you may even see a trend that looks like a gradual decline.  This is where we need to have our eternal perspective and realize that if we continue to trust in the Lord, we will eventually see an exponential growth.  Below is a zoomed out picture of the exact same data from which the previous graph was extracted.  It's pretty clear where this data is heading b/c we have zoomed out and we can see ourselves the way God sees us.

I don't know how high up on this curve we will be before we die, perhaps it will still be hard to look back and discern much progress.  But I do know that all blessings given unto us will eventually be ours if we endure to the end thanks to the enabling power of Christ's Atonement.