This is what the Lord says: “The wise should not boast in their wisdom, the powerful in their power, or the rich in their riches. Let anyone who desires to boast boast in this: that they know me and understand that I am the Lord who reveals steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, and that these are the things in which I delight (Jer. 9:23).

I need a blog segue. I am fascinated with the issue of suffering and its relationship to God’s reality, but I need to move into considering how comparison acts as an enemy of what is real. So, hello transition …

One of the most powerful ways to bring God’s perfect real world into our incomplete and desperate one is to give ourselves to comforting and caring for the afflicted. In doing so, we are privileged to imitate the Lord’s nature – his goodness, humility, and mercy – especially in a society that continually devalues those who are weak, poor, aged, or somehow limited by mental or emotional incapacity (e.g. the movement to eliminate handicapped children, such as those with Down’s Syndrome, in vitro).

It seems obvious that being able to bring to others the consolation that we have received from the Lord is a gift for God’s people. After all, it’s very much a biblical blessing. In the first chapter of his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes of sharing in both suffering and comfort. There is a depth of compassion, a quickening of grace, and a deeper comprehension of love that arises from the practice of “mourning with those who mourn” (Rom. 12:15). What can be wrong with such outcomes?

Well, what can be wrong is that coming alongside the afflicted also can open a unique window into the world of comparisonitis (a word I am happily cribbing from my friend Sam Williamson). Normally, we think of comparing ourselves with others as an exercise in complaining about why we don’t have a life that’s as blessed as the comparees. Most often the advice that an observer (especially my mother) might make is to realize that things could always be worse.

Now, my parents were the Potentates of Finding Someone Less Fortunate than We. Any complaint from us elicited the specter of “being like so and so,” usually someone physically or mentally or socially challenged. What if you were like poor Billy with the wandering eye and not too bright and his parents let him run around at all hours of the night?

Well, aside from the fact that I would have traded several IQ points for the chance to run around beyond my prescribed bed time, I came to understand that “There but for the grace of God go I” rarely increased gratitude or compassion. Instead, it pushed me to realize that I STILL didn’t have it as good as many so-and-sos around me. More to the point, the saying denigrates grace and its presence in every human situation, however “unfortunate” it may seem.

Then there are those who fall prey to the opposite tendency – to survivor’s guilt (another idea theft, this time from my wife Joanne). Their burden: Why do I have things SO great? Why so MUCH grace, favor, blessing, gifting, provision? There is no more virtue in questioning abundance than in complaining about lack.

So that’s a long way of saying that comparisonitis is a serious disease, sometimes blatantly evident in our lives, sometimes subtly expressed. I like the “itis” suffix: It means that something is inflamed. In this case, it is the heightened, envious awareness of my condition relative to that of another. I see it as a species of suffering that leads to similar “Why?” questions, and to regret, despair, shame, false remorse, bitterness, and the wasted time and energy of a fantasy life.

Comparison – whether “up” or “down” finds varied objects to provide a basis of measurement. The most obvious is juxtaposing our lives with the external other. The second is to test our lot against the self that we think we ought to be (including what we believe God wants us to be).

In the first case, the script is embarrassingly familiar and almost too simple. You have more or better than I, or less or worse if I suffer from survivor guilt. Better job, house, bank account, wife (OK, in this instance, entirely theoretical). Your education, your looks (again, a hypothetical), your health. The attention people pay you, your popularity, your friends. And special categories for Christians: your ministry, your church, your Bible verse memory score.

As a pastor, I experienced the familiar temptation to set my sermons, “my” congregation (especially numbers), “my” mission over and against the competition. This was an exhaustive comparison that included other pastors, outreaches, buildings, and the funny signs out in front of local churches. The Spirit was constantly in my ear about not being a census-taker and being focussed on his call to me and to us as his people. And he had to be, considering the intensity of the message of ministry envy.

The second type of comparison often follows on the first. When we see others succeed, a kind of unhealthy self-reflection can result. What am I doing with my life? Have I made the right choices? Why didn’t I? Why did I? Why didn’t God? If only I had, or hadn’t …

This “ideal self” standard is a broad, comprehensive one. It looms over us in times of sin, failure, loss, and humiliation. Or, for the guilt-prone among us, when we flourish, succeed, or receive an outpouring of blessings. It especially stings once we are beyond the flexible, nonchalant years of our teens and twenties. We build decades of wish lists, ossified versions of the person we believe we should have been, or could have been with just a subtle shift in circumstances.

Comparison tells us that we have become a disappointment to ourselves, to our parents, our friends, other believers. And certainly (as if he is caught unawares) to God himself. We don’t really know what the standards or ideals are – it’s the invisible high-jump bar. All we know is that we’re not making it; that someone else is; and that there must be a better life for us somehow and somewhere else.

To help us construct our fantasies, the world parades a panoply of possessions to own, successful and beautiful people to judge ourselves against, places to go and adventures to have, all so that we can drink from the broad stream of discontent and wander off in search of compensating consolation. Whether it’s on Facebook, at the mall, or through our 24/7 media barrage, modern culture’s selective presentation of doctored snapshots reinforces the urge to compare and compete, breeding a powerful unreality where everyone is perpetually happy, good-looking, and having more fun than you certainly are enjoying.

Comparison is a consummate idol workshop, where we conjure up fantasy selves, experiences, relationships, hopes and longings that inhabit our past, present, and future. Against these false worlds is the One God, who stands and draws us to himself and to what is real and eternal. How does he go about converting us?

First, he reveals his sovereign creation of and rule over our lives. Psalms 139:14 tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully fashioned. Comparison rails and rebels against who we are and who God made us to be. It idolizes a different version of self – of both our beauty and the ways that we have marred it. It says to the Lord, “Not good enough.” The language of false worship of comparison is wishing, hoping, desiring, and regretting. The problem is that, in the words of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, “(God) doesn’t tell you anyone’s story but your own,” and that he will not show us what might have been. We are – in this moment, as we really are – intended to be broken vessels holding a treasure of transcendent power and value.

This is the second reality: the Father’s grace-fueled desire and power to make us fruitful in spite of our suffering, sin, and seeming inferiority to whatever standards of accomplishment and personal glory that we hold for ourselves. In my experience, it takes time and an often quiet erosion of the urge to be or do something “better” so that I can justify myself or God. Time and grace and believing and trusting that I don’t need to compare myself up or down, to someone else or to some ideal expression of me. A surrender of the gifts, and the deficits; of the strengths and the frailties; of the times of suffering and the moments of euphoria. The biblical claim is that offering our rubble and ashes to the Father is the surest way for him to build the beauty of the kingdom in and through us.

Such surrender also allows us to truly fit into the world and (if we are Christians) the body. I think it is easy for many of us to look at the relevant passages on the mutuality of gifts (e.g. Rom. 12) and think that they are theoretically correct, but personally inapplicable. Heads and ears and eyes are pretty key parts of the whole, but the rest of it? All I can say is that you don’t know how important toes are until you try to balance without them.

I’m writing this during the week before Easter, a time when we can look at Jesus, the True Man, enduring death on a shameful cross. Not a good look as promotional material for a successful ministry. Not something that attracts imitation or admiration from our ambitious selves. In the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The figure of the Crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.”

Or, as we come to realize, the cross bears the one Man whom I can see and truly say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”