Dealing with feelings of jealousy

Prickly cactus

TL:DR; We are all made in the image of God, we all have unique potentials and capabilities. I LOVE to see people walking in the full measure of their skills and talents, as I love walking in my own too! If you really, really knew who you were in Christ, and walked in the power that God gives us, then you would be too busy being excited about your own life, and going about achieving things, to waste time being jealous of other people!

Well I was just silently watching a YouTube video on the topic of jealousy, while praying for something. And it occurred to me to write a post about dealing with feelings of jealousy. I am currently finding it hard to identify exactly why this is the case (what I am going to talk about), but this is one area of my life that by God’s grace I don’t struggle with. What I do know is that it is all due to my faith.
By the grace of God, I feel so confident about who I am, my potential in Christ, and who God has called me to be. I know that other people’s success does not need to threaten my own sense of self, because there are literally infinite amounts of success out there available for each one of us, as long as we are willing to work for it. Some people treat success as a zero-sum game – everything you achieve somehow detracts from whatever I am able to achieve, or the success that is available for me! But I know that if someone achieves everything that they could possibly want to achieve, all my own potential remains there for me too to achieve!  So I am more than happy to celebrate the success that other people have attained, knowing that that success does not in any way detract from my own potential.

Furthermore, I know that no positive character trait is withheld from me!
You know what?! How I wish that I could convince everyone who reads this blog that God is real, the Bible is true, prayer works! Oh my goodness, it is all so true. But you will only see this if you genuinely give God your all. So usually, if someone demonstrates a character trait that I would want that badly, perhaps something that deeply impresses me, or makes me feel inadequate in my character, I will simply go to God and ask for that character trait! I know that every positive trait is within reach for me, if I am prepared to work and pray hard enough for it. Sometimes I will do a cost-benefit analysis, and realise that what I have wanted just requires too much time and effort to bother with at all.

And yet, with all this I do sometimes feel a weird twinge of envy. And I think to myself “Woah, where did that come from?!” At those times I will need to go back to God, develop my confidence about who I am, identify any character traits in which I might be deficient, and go out to pray for those and work on those.

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