The Danger of Comparison

Last week, I was feeling very unaccomplished. A classmate of mine had just been promoted. All over Facebook and Instagram, my friends and contemporaries were posting about weddings, babies and new jobs and it made me wonder why I wasn’t like them. I started comparing my life to theirs and was feeling bad.

But the Holy Spirit wouldn’t let me wallow in my self pity and sin (yes, being unappreciative of God’s blessings is a sin). As God would have it, my daily Bible reading landed on 2 Corinthians 10:12 “…when they measure themselves with themselves and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding and behave unwisely.” AMP. How can a child of God who has the Bible at her disposal act without wisdom. I immediately asked God for forgiveness and started singing songs of thanks and praise.

The danger of comparison is that it blinds us to the many blessings of God in our lives.  We use comparison like a measuring stick, assessing our own worthiness based on others’ victories or failures, beating ourselves or one another down with it. Ann Voskamp writes that Comparison is a thug that robs your joy. But it’s even more than that —  makes you a thug who beats down somebody – or your soul.
Scales always lie. They don’t make a scale that ever told the truth about value, about worth, about significance.
the thing about measuring sticks is that they try to rank some people as big and some people as small — but we aren’t sizes. We are souls.  There are no better people or worse people — there are only God-made souls. There is no point trying to size people up, no point trying to compare – because souls defy measuring.
When we compare, we’re essentially telling God that what he created wasn’t good enough.

Every time God creates, He does so with intention.

He utilized an equal and exact amount of creativity when He made you, and every other person on this planet. When we choose to compare ourselves with others around us, and the fictitious women we see in the magazine, we aren’t only making life harder on ourselves, we are telling God He didn’t do a good enough job.

God doesn’t make junk; He only makes masterpieces.

And guess what? No one can articulate God’s creativity quite like you can. You were made to showcase the hand of God.

And you do that best when you stop comparing, and start accepting, the you that God made you to be.

Source:   Demilade Isioma Elemo
Pics:        Google