“Very small fish. Very large pond.  It’s impossible to stand out in a crowd of 8 million people. You can feel insignificant fast in NYC. Most people move here to “make it.” The sheer number of people coupled with the higher bar a higher cost of living creates no doubt fuels a collective competitiveness that drives the city’s phenomenal economic engine.  But the individual effect of this collective competition is quite the opposite. NYC humbles you.”

Sometimes the effect is just the opposite. Instead of being humbled by other people’s talents and accomplishments, we are jealous or we want to diminish them. We resent them and wonder why they have the attention or the approval instead of us. It doesn’t happen with celebrities who live in another world. It happens with people we know. It is not even about wealth most often. It is about why people overlook us and pay attention to them.

Scripture says we are not to covet because it leads to the destruction of life. Remember Cain and Abel. God told Cain that sin was crouching at his door and desired to have him. Resentment and jealousy are always desiring to have us ­especially in a world that measures everything by how much approval we can accumulate. We are constantly urged to compare ourselves to others and find ourselves lacking.

In Sonnet 29 William Shakespeare writes:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;

Shakespeare nailed it with that one phrase, “With what I most enjoy contented least.” The end result of comparison is never satisfaction but discontent with what we most enjoy.

This week I read the book “Not In God’s Name” by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the UK. He wrote it to trace the source of the hostility between Christians, Muslims and Jews. He goes all the way back to Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Rachel and Leah. The Bible is filled with sibling rivalry and one child feeling slighted or overlooked or even cheated out of their blessing.

The whole book of Genesis is one long tale of the effects of jealousy, anger, violence and resentment. In fact, part of his explanation for the continuing conflict is just that. Sibling rivalry, resentment, and desiring what the other has is at the root of the history of violence that has been passed from one generation to the next.

While he could not say it from his Jewish perspective, we can say it. We no longer have to worry about competing for the love of the Father. We don’t have to worry about who has the blessing or who is chosen over the other. There is no competition in the body of Christ ­ in spite of all the pressure to be visible, liked, followed and influential.

My friend is right. If we are always comparing ourselves to others we will be crushed. If we desire what they have ­even to the point of seeing them lose it ­we will be turned into people always dependent on comparison and never experience the relief of resting in our own gifts and abilities being used by God.