Life: Comparisons

One thing I have noticed about people and it is very true of myself is that we never seem to be happy with what we have got, we always seem to compare ourselves to others.

As a child we compare ourselves to our friends - thinking they have it better than us – better toys, better and later bedtimes, better holidays etc.

As a teenager we compare grades with our friends, or compare how we look compared to others, especially the popular girls!  - we think people are smarter than us, better looking than us, have better clothes than us, live in bigger houses than us etc

We compare ourselves to models or TV actresses/actors, seeing them as skinnier than us and more beautiful - and this comparison is not good and can be harmful especially as it can lead to eating disorders etc

No comparison we make as a child or as a teenager is healthy – but they never stop there, comparisons continue as we continue our life journey.  At university/college we continue the comparisons, again comparing grades, clothes, lifestyle, our backgrounds e.g where we come from which leads to oh my city is better than yours, or if you were me leading to poor Irish jokes and silly questions about growing up in Northern Ireland.

Moving onto adult life, you would think we would get better at this and be mature and not compare ourselves to others, but I think it gets worse. We compare:

• Our weight against others
• What we wear
• What jobs we have
• The houses we live in
• Our bank balances

And if you have kids, then we compare our kids – my kids are much better behaved than yours etc etc.

Comparisons are not healthy but we do it every day. I do. I sit and compare myself to others, thinking that girl is much more beautiful than me, she is happier than me because he has a husband, she has more to give than me, she has more money than me etc etc. It’s not healthy and can lead to depressing thoughts.  It’s not healthy because we are also denying ourselves to be the person we were created to be – because my constantly comparing ourselves to others it is showing that we are not happy or content with who we are or what we have got. And we should be.

As a Christian the worst thing we can do is compare ourselves to others in terms of our faith and our relationship with God e.g saying things like she prays better than me, or their views of the Bible aren’t the same as what I believe, or my church is better than her church. Again it is unhealthy to do this and it is wrong as no one is better than anyone else – we are all made equal in Christ and we were all made to be different as well – if we were all the same the world would be a very boring place! We have all been designed to be unique and our individual journeys have been carved out to suit who we are.

When you compare yourself to another person, you always lose, and at the same time the other person loses too. Each of us has been created by the hands of a Holy God, we are all fearfully and wonderfully made and our stories and the twists and turns of our lives, the things that are hard for us, and the things that come naturally to us, are as unique to us as our own fingerprints are.

As Shauna Niequist says in her book Bittersweet “One way to ensure a miserable life is to constantly measure your own life by the lives of others”.  It eats us up and stops us from living life the way we have been created to – it takes away our joy.  Be like Cindy Lou Who in Dr Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and do not let the Grinch steal your joy instead sing Cindy Lou sing!

So the moral of this blog, is do not compare yourself to others, or compare others to yourself either.  We need to be content in who we are, what we have and what God has given us. Yes I am telling myself this everyday too!!