Those People With the Perfect Lives

It's true. Comparison is the death of contentment. And when we do compare, we do so with an incomplete story. I long for the "this" in someone else's life, and she longs for the "that" in mine, but we both miss the big picture of it all. Only God knows the details.

We forget that joys come with troubles and abundance is mingled with emptiness. We're blind to the sleepless nights or the silent heartaches, the anxiety-ridden days, or the starving souls.

In all our looking at what God has given to someone else, we miss what He's given to us. It's a dignified way of shaking our fist at Him and His sovereign care over us.

God doesn't usually let us see deep into the "little worlds" of others. But our contentment level would only rise if we meditated on the fact that we're all bearing burdens, we're all going through the Refiner's fire, and the truth is, the only "perfect" life is the one God has ordained for us.

When Satan or our own flesh first plant the seeds of envy, we silence the lies with His truths. We pray instead of pout. We clothe ourselves in love and compassion, remembering we have no clue what burdens others battle every day. We meditate on His past kindnesses to us, the greatest being the life He gives us in Jesus Christ.
Discontentment and envy are snuffed out, and we're left praising God for the amazing panorama of providences we call our lives.

"Every man we meet, carries about with him, in the unperceived solitude of his bosom, a little world of his own--and we are just as blind, and as insensible, and as dull, both of perception and of sympathy, about his engrossing objects, as he is about ours; and, did we suffer this observation to have all its weight upon us, it might serve to make us more candid, and more considerate of others. It might serve to abate the monopolizing selfishness of our nature. It might serve to soften down all the malignity which comes out of those envious contemplations that we are so apt to cast on the fancied ease and prosperity which are around us. It might serve to reconcile every man to his own lot, and dispose him to bear, with thankfulness, his own burden; and if this train of sentiment were prosecuted with firmness, and calmness, and impartiality, it would lead to the conclusion, that each profession in life has its own peculiar pains, and its own besetting inconveniences--that, from the very bottom of society, up to the golden pinnacle which blazons upon its summit, there is much in the shape of care and of suffering to be found--that, throughout all the conceivable varieties of human condition, there are trials, which can neither be adequately told on the one side, nor fully understood on the other--that the ways of God to man are as equal in this, as in every department of His administration--and that, go to whatever quarter of human experience we may, we shall find that He has provided enough to exercise the patience, and to accomplish the purposes of a wise and salutary discipline upon all His children."
~Thomas Chalmers, 
1780-1847

With love,
Trisha