Ever compared yourself to someone else?
It's a dangerous activity, I promise. It can sneak in without being recognized and change your attitude from happy to sad before you even realize it is happening!
That's happened to me plenty (as I'm sure it has a lot of us!). Today I remembered the verse 2 Corinthians 10:12, "When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise" (NIV).
It's foolish to compare what we see in someone else's life to our own, but it's something I think everyone on earth deals with, simply because of that common phrase "the grass is always greener on the other side." The thing we don't realize is that if we switched places, we would get someone else's trouble, junk, trials, and difficulties, right in the middle of all the "goodness" we see.
Someone may look perfect on the outside, but that doesn't mean they have a perfect life.
Take Hollywood for example. Say I wish I was Jennifer Aniston who makes how many millions for every movie she makes. She's a superstar. We trade places and you know what I'd get? A life of being followed by paparazzi, every move of mine scrutinized by the public, and a whole list of other things that she's dealing with in life. Yeah, you'd get a lot of money, but money doesn't make a life good!
Okay, take a more realistic example. You see your friends doing ________ and wish you could be doing the same thing. You'd love that person's life. In reality, if you swapped places, you'd inherit all the junk they've gone through in life... maybe they lost someone they loved or have a family member who is an alcoholic or were abused as a kid. Nobody's life is perfect.
When the ugly heads of discontent and comparison appear, smush them down like you smushed the mallet on top of the little heads that pop out of that video game at Chuckie Cheese (you know which one I'm talking about?). Recognize that we all have things we deal with, and every life has beauty bloom in its time. We just take turns experiencing it.
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