Happy Easter to all readers of this column. May the power of Christ’s resurrection be made manifest in your lives. What you have is the best to you until you have a chance to compare it with what someone else has. Your spouse is the best until someone convinces you that you could have married a better person. Suddenly, the belch you endured in him for twenty years as a trademark guffaw now begins to sound like the ennui of a horrible and disgraceful habit. Suddenly, the snores you hitherto adored as a lullaby now sound like the grunt of a foraging pig.
Comparison is the assassin of many potentials. It is life’s greatest distraction. It is the reason for a terrible self-esteem as well as an exaggerated sense of importance. You cannot feel inferior or superior to someone you have never compared yourself to. You believed in the brilliance of your child until you compared his result to those of his classmates. You were happy on your teaching job until an old schoolmate visited you in his luxury car or became a governor or multimillionaire.
Failure is not a big deal until you are given a matrix to measure achievement. So, you compare where you are to where you think you ought to be and you are angry. Being single isn’t a problem until you start comparing yourself to your married friends as well as society’s expectations.
The First temptation and subsequent Fall of Adam & Eve was not about the fruit of a tree. It began with COMPARISON, followed by a shift of FOCUS.
God created Adam & Eve as His regents on earth and conferred on them, every authority they would require to be what He designed them to be. Their identity was SECURE in that consciousness of WHO they were and their accompanying mandate. That consciousness gave them access to anything and everything on the earth.
Until another ‘Professor’ came and ‘showed’ them that they could access the ‘wisdom’ hidden in the very tree God forbade them from eating. Secondly, he convinced them that God was keeping from them, a superior identity that would make them like Him, not minding that they were already created IN GOD’S IMAGE and LIKENESS! Instantly, their FOCUS shifted from the abundance of trees that their original identity gave them access to, to the ONLY ONE forbidden.
Trouble begins in your life when you pawn your real identity to assume one that someone else convinced you was of greater value. Every bad habit you ever had happened because you compared yourself to someone else who was indulging in it and seemingly without consequence, especially if they were people you looked up to. Smoking, sexual promiscuity, lying, stealing, violent crimes, sexual debauchery, and other vices have no hold on anyone until he is first made to compare the “deficiency” of his moral uprightness to what the so-called majority or “everybody” is doing! Peer pressure is about comparison.
You were created for significance, not for popularity or fame. However, your significance in life is not in what you do like others but what you do differently.
Your uniqueness is your passport to a meaningful future. The more you try to be like someone else, the more you remind people of that person and less of you! Your differentiation is your power and stands you out from the pack. There are seven billion inhabitants on earth, yet no two people’s fingerprints are alike.
When you can link your identity to the significant value you were prepackaged to contribute to creation, you will never again fall into the comparison trap! The only thing you were called to pursue in life is how you can become the best version of YOU!
Your job is what you merely do to pay your bills. Your work is what you were actually born to do. When you know WHO you are and WHAT you were made for, even if an employer sacks you from a job, nobody alive can sack you from work, YOUR work.
If you don’t value who you are, someone will sell you who you are not and you will pay a premium for the counterfeit. It is foolish to compare yourself with others. The grass is only green on the other side of the fence because they watered their yard.
When you constantly compare yourself to others, whether “better” or “worse” than you, you withdraw from yourself the permission to succeed on God’s terms.
God never duplicates identities. After He crafted you, He junked the mold so that there can never be another you. The unworthiness you see in you isn’t a function of your makeup, it is a function of your ignorance.
Be inspired by the success and achievements of others but never compare yourself to them. God gives talents, not by quantum but by capacity because He knows what each person can handle. But comparison breeds hatred and spite, both for the one who endows and for the endowment.
Comparison is the cemetery of amputated greatness. It amplifies difficulties and dwarfs possibilities, leaving anyone in its grip panting for breath in the abundance of fresh air, looking over his shoulders as one pursued by a lion. Comparison is the fuel of greed and gluttony, seeking refuge in primitive acquisition even when satiated with much.
Comparison is the parent of envy, jealousy and spite, looking at another’s success and thinking “That should have been me”, or seeing one assumed less endowed and thinking, “I am better than him.” Comparison drives competition, making contentment an impossibility, always striving but never fully attaining
Whenever you amplify your lack, you minimize your greatness. While others applaud the giant in you, your own mirror despises the lilliputian midget it reflects to you. Comparison is a disservice to focus, a toxin to any environment of relationship, always elevating competition over collaboration.
Comparison is the bedrock of ingratitude that crowns self as the center of the universe, embittered from being so entitled while grunting and grumbling when others don’t worship at your altar. An entitled soul cannot appreciate kindness. No matter the limits of his own competence or the magnitude of the gift, he is always convinced he should have been given more.
The toxin of comparison is only extracted by the elixir of GRATITUDE, first to GOD, WHOSE you are; for WHO you are, for WHAT you are capable of becoming if you keep a steady course, for and to the PEOPLE strategically positioned to facilitate your journey, for the ABUNDANCE within and around you, for yet unleashed greatness awaiting expression, for where you’ve been, where you are, and where you are headed, for the breath in your nostrils. And more. Gratitude activates and empowers hope, that as long as we have life, so much is possible
Gratitude takes containment out of contentment, teaching us to be happy where we are while we make progress on the journey towards where we hope to be.
Gratitude shapes focus, making distinction discernible while obliterating competition
Gratitude makes joyfulness easy, facilitating sincere love, for God, self and others.
Keep your blessing tank full by being thankful.
Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!
Assignment:
- Express GRATITUDE to God instead of petitioning Him for needs.
- Identify 5 people whose lives have blessed you. Write them a note of profound gratitude, letting them know how being WHO they are has helped to become WHO you are.
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