Let me be straightaway honest with you. Sometimes, I compare. I look at the way other people seem to be connecting and sometimes, all I see are the ways in which I haven’t connected. Someone shares a word with the group, and I wonder why I don’t have a word to share. People don’t always laugh at my jokes. Now and then, I have nothing beneficial to add to a conversation, and I don’t always understand why. Yes. These things happen to me.
Comparison is ugly though. It’s ugly because in it, I dare to make the claim that the Father might deliberately be withholding some of his goodness from me. As if that were even something he would fathom. As if he would find delight in withholding the good gifts he SO desires to give. He certainly could withhold his goodness, and he would still be good, for that is who he is.
But he doesn’t do that. He doesn’t withhold his goodness from me, from you. Just as a father would not give a rock to his son who asked for bread, so our Father will not give destruction to his children who ask for delight. I say he’s a good Father, but when I compare, I deny that goodness.
Here is the truth, and I pray you be ready to embrace it as I am learning to do:
The qualities you see in others that you do not have are not deficits in who you are, but differences.
Someone else is the wittiest, funniest son of a gun in the room, and it’s not you? Praise God. You get to laugh. Someone else seems to know just what to say and when to say it in every situation? Beautiful. You get to glean from their wisdom. Someone else is outgoing beyond wonder and is esteemed by young and old alike? Fantastic. You get a friend. Someone else plays music and sings and confidently embraces their gifts? Hallelujah, because you love to dance.
Those qualities you feel you lack are not deficits. They are differences. And oh, if we could just come to see the Truth for what it really is! He has made us GOOD. Very good. And He has made us different.
But wait… Don’t we all want to be different, anyway? We like to be the first to discover a new band. Why? Because we like to be different. When we speak, we do not want to say the same thing that the person before us said. Why? Because we like to be different. When we write, we do not simply copy the words from our favorite book and call them our own. Why? Because we like to be different. So why do we have such a hard time embracing that we are all, each man, woman and child, profoundly and beautifully different?
I am different. Sometimes, when I worship, I want to dance in his presence. Sometimes, I want to be still and marvel at his beauty, quietly, in my own soul. I don’t care what everyone else is doing around me. What matters is that I’m starting to see who I am. I’m starting to see the goodness of God in the land of the living. And I believe that he does not withhold it from me. If I believe that, if I truly believe it, then I will cease to compare myself to my brothers and sisters and cease to create in my own own heart deficits of character. I have no deficits but my own selfish, sinful heart. I am mature and complete, lacking nothing (James 1:4). Yet the Word of God tells me in the next verse, James 1:5, that if I think I am lacking in something, I ought simply to ask God and refrain from comparison because I love a God who gives generously to all without finding fault.
Father, please let these weak, feeble hearts of ours grasp the glory of your beauty. Let us have deeper revelation of our identities. Let us be confident of the goodness so apparent in the land where we live. And let us cease to compare as we walk confidently in our differences and relish in the gifts you have given so freely to each of your precious sons and daughters.
I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. – Psalm 27:13
