How can I not be envious of how happy other families are?

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James 3:16 “For where envying…is, there is confusion and every evil work.”

Like me, you might not care about things like houses, cars and other possessions. Even if you don’t have an abundance of extra “stuff,” you might not care about those things. So maybe you don’t envy someone because of their house, their car or all the other things people accumulate.

You also might not envy someone’s beauty, talent, or position. Maybe you’re as happy washing dishes for VBS as you would be singing or teaching or speaking. For you, maybe it’s about doing something…anything…for the Lord more than what you get to do.

Maybe you realize God has given you certain abilities according to His plan. So you might not even envy people who have your same ability, but who seem to be more “successful.” However, that one hits a little closer to home, doesn’t it?

But you and I would be fooling ourselves if we thought envy is limited to material things, talent, position, or success. Those of us who love a prodigal would trade any or all of that to have our prodigal do what’s right and to have that relationship restored.

There’s nothing wrong with longing for broken relationships to be healed. There’s also nothing wrong with grieving a relationship we didn’t have and now can never have with someone who has died. Broken relationships hurt, and there’s nothing wrong with looking directly at that hurt and feeling sad.

However, it can become a problem when we look at the relationships others seem to have and to compare them with what we have. It’s only a baby step from there to envy, and there are several problems with that.

The first is that we can’t possibly know what a relationship is like between two other people. We are only looking through the window of their lives that they have opened to us. Further, any time we compare ourselves with someone else, we are comparing our inside with their outside, and that includes their relationships and our own.

The second is that we can’t know God’s plan for their lives or the burdens they carry on that path. We only know our own. Comparing our path in a negative way with theirs is envy at its ugliest because it implies God has treated us unfairly. And isn’t that what envy is really about? We look at what we have, compare it with what others have, and want that instead of what God has given us.

That kind of discontent and envy is destructive. It causes “confusion and every evil work.” (James 3:16) No wonder the Bible says, “envy rots the bones.” (Prov 14:30) God expects us to trust Him and to “be content with such things as [we] have…” (Heb 13:5) Content? Does that mean I’m supposed to be all “happy, happy, joy, joy” when my relationship with my son or daughter or my Mom or Dad is broken? Of course not.

If we’ve done something to damage the relationship, we do what we can to fix it. (Matt. 5:23) Then we wait for God to do what we cannot do and trust Him until He does. The way we can be content is found in the rest of Hebrews 13:5: “…for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.”

God didn’t make a mistake in what He has given you and what He has taken away. His job is to direct our steps. Our job is to trust Him instead of seething with discontent. And that envy is one of the things we need to lay aside.

Challenge for Today: Can you, just for today, lay aside your envy and ask God to help you to trust Him and to be content.