Most of us know what it feels like to have a perfectly good day fall apart in five minutes. We catch a glimpse of someone else’s life — their marriage, possessions, career, platform, or seemingly easy way of moving through life — and our hearts sink. Why them? Why not me? Moments earlier, we felt content, maybe even grateful.
Now we feel smaller and less-than and not enough, wondering why the grass looks greener in somebody else’s yard. In the fourth chapter of my recent book, The Mercy King, I wrote this about envy: “Envy insists that joy and contentment are always out of reach, just one more achievement, one more possession, one more relationship away. But the Gospel tells a different story. In Christ nothing essential is missing.
In him we already have what we need most: love that doesn’t waver, belonging that doesn’t expire, and a future that doesn’t depend on our performance.” Comparison grips us because we all want something to tell us who we are and whether our lives matter. It promises significance and security once we get ahead of someone else — and then moves the line again.
Bertrand Russell, who was no friend of Christianity, saw this with a clarity that is both humorous and haunting: “If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed.” Every rung on the ladder has someone standing above it, and the ladder ends in a myth. We’ve all heard the familiar quip that comparison is the thief of joy.
C.S. Lewis got to the root of why when he observed that people aren’t proud merely of being rich, clever, or good-looking, he observed, but of being richer, cleverer, or better-looking than others. “It