Comparison Kills (Galatians 5:16-17)

Comparison kills.

I have been thinking about this a lot this past week, and it all started with pecans. This year, I took a different approach to picking them up, and over a period of about six weeks, each time I walked Ella Jay (my dog), I filled my pockets with pecans I thought looked good and then dumped them into containers by the back door. Each time the wind had a big blow, more pecans fell until last week, I finally asked my husband to go get them cracked and blown because I felt we had passed the time to have any good ones remaining on the ground. When I returned from a short trip to visit my parents, I walked in and saw the bag he left for me, I thought we had a pretty good harvest for a not-so-good year for pecans.


And then I started picking out the pecans. Many were obviously shriveled and blackened, rather shockingly so; others were rather dry; some were less than wonderful; several partially blemished, but many were good. However, you would never have known what the shell contained by looking at them from the outside. They all looked the same--brown, no holes--like pecans.


On my first approach, I decided to pick out the blackened pecans, but then I decided it would go faster to just pick out the really good ones, so I began. As I picked them out, I noticed it got harder and harder to find similar pecans to the plump, meaty, whole, beautiful ones I now collected in my left hand. After the first pick through, I started attempting to sort the good from the bad and got all the obviously “bad” ones out and started back through the “good” ones left. I began thinking how deceptive the process was. I had already removed the “Grade A” pecans and found myself comparing completely different pecans, struggling to tell if they were really good or bad because in all honesty, they were somewhere in between, and none of them looked like the ones I first chose from the bag. And I found myself rejecting most of the bag as I sorted through them.


Then my husband walked in after work to find me standing there picking from nearly the bottom of the bag. He reached into my now full reject bowl and said, “There’s nothing wrong with that pecan! Why do you have it in this bowl?”


I immediately thought to myself an answer: “Because it didn’t look like the good ones I began with!” But I held my thoughts and told him I would pick back through the reject pile. What I found was that I had many “acceptable” pecans I had thrown away because they did not look like the obviously good ones I began with. 


I have several thoughts about this. One is that my attempts to pick only the ones that looked alike failed miserably. When compared, some perfectly acceptable pecans failed the grade. That’s what I mean by comparison kills. But don’t we do this so often in life? Whether it is comparing ourselves or looking at others in judgment, it never ends well. On the other side of the comparison coin, sometimes by comparing ourselves to the wrong standard (like maybe the world and what it says is acceptable), we fall far short of the true standard, which is Christ. 


So I packed the three-and-a-half quarts of acceptable pecans and placed them in the freezer to preserve them before taking another quick trip to my parents the following week. In scanning through channels in the middle point of my journey back where there is no strong signal, I came upon the middle of a David Jeremiah sermon, and he spoke about envy and arrogance being the end result of comparison, using his own struggles with this as an example. He boiled it down to this very loose paraphrase: I either look at myself and find myself lacking when compared with others, and I envy; the other side of the coin is to look at myself and find myself in a better place than another, and I get arrogantly “puffed up” as a result. Neither is good!

While he didn't say this, I made the connection to my pecans and drew the conclusion once again that comparison kills and invites sin into my life because my focal point is not Christ and His work in me (to His glory and praise) but rather the flesh and the law working in my life. 


These thoughts about comparison have kept nagging at me until today when I find myself studying Galatians 5, and Paul's admonition in verses 16-17 seem key: 


But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do (ESV). 


I have the picture in my head of the difference in this year's pecan crop. The long, plump, meaty, beautiful pecans that in all honesty taste the same as the other variety that were shorter, less meaty, and darker in color. In Christ, we are all different, but He uses those differences to meet the needs of the body in which He has placed us. FOR HIS GLORY! But I so often get distracted by what I don't have or what I have that I wish I didn't have that I lose sight of this.


I need to remember that HE IS MY FOCUS.


I need to remember that I am not.


I need to remember that I am to use the gifting He has given me, wringing out every ounce of the gifting(s) he has supplied me with to the best of my ability and always doing so FOR HIS GLORY, not worrying that it isn't as "good" as someone else's gifting. That just cheapens God's work in my life and robs Him of the glory He always deserves. He has gifted me in particular ways to share the gospel message with others, and He has done so in unique ways. When I stoop to comparisons, if I am brutally honest with myself, it is usually about me, so this year, instead of looking around, I am praying that the Lord will help me to just look up confidently to Him for direction and support and sustenance and direction and whatever else I need in that moment to do the thing He has called me to do.


He is enough! 


I am going to leave that reminder there again for me because in the struggles of my flesh against the Spirit that is alive in me, I sometimes forget and feed the wrong one. I want to choose life over death every time, and I am praying that you, too, will remember as you walk through this sinful, broken world that comparison kills.

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