I found an interesting article this morning on Substack from Zachery Conner. He makes a great point about comparing our blessings to someone else’s. I hope you find it as helpful as I did.
But God’s faithfulness to someone else is not evidence of His neglect of us.
Comparison distorts our perspective because it tempts us to interpret God’s goodness through what He has given others rather than receiving His goodness through what He has given us. We begin to believe that if our lives looked more like theirs, we would finally be satisfied.
Yet the heart that depends on comparison for contentment will never be at rest for long. There will always be someone with greater success, greater recognition, or circumstances we would prefer. If we measure our lives by what others possess, we will continually find reasons to be dissatisfied with what God has entrusted to us.
Paul writes:
“But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor.”
— Galatians 6:4
The answer is not to pretend that we never notice the differences between our lives and the lives of others. It is to stop allowing those differences to determine our sense of God’s goodness. We are called to examine our own lives before God, not to spend them measuring ourselves against our neighbors.