Flourish

The Comfort Food of Sin

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes” (Matthew 6:19-25).

My friend, Hayley, likes to talk about skills in terms of superpowers. She insists everybody has one, and that her particular superpower is recognizing other people’s superpowers. It’s true, she’s dynamite at identifying exactly what people are meant to do, and it’s quite a gift. She has other lesser superpowers, and one of them is naming things. If you ever need to name anything—a yacht, a child, an obscure trend, she is your girl. Crafty titles are her specialty. I won the friend lottery with her about 15 years ago, before either of us realized how cool, edgy, and interesting she would become, and how uncool, fairly traditional, and conformist I would remain.

One cold and rainy night we were on the phone talking about her recent move to New York and how hard it is to start over. She expressed frustration that the same sins, the same insidious ways of thinking keep entrapping her. I jumped in to commiserate, since we share the same default settings. Out of her mouth came this brilliant phrase, “It’s like envy is my comfort food of sin. It’s the place I keep coming back to. It’s like tucking into macaroni and cheese, or curling up in a favorite cashmere sweater. It’s where I feel comfortable.” Not one to miss out on an opportunity to capitalize on her superpower, I said, “Hey, can I steal your phrase and write about that?” Like the generous person she is, she let me appropriate her brilliance.

Envy is a shape-shifting, hungry beast that is never satisfied. As soon as you obtain whatever it is you’ve been envying, happiness is snatched out of your reach as something uglier and deeper, and of course, more attractive, sprouts to take its place. Frustratingly, I seem to fall for it every time.

When all our friends started buying houses, I desperately wanted to own a home. The Lord provided and we bought our first house. I was elated and so happy … until other people started buying bigger and better houses and remodeling and suddenly my house looked kind of crappy by comparison. The cycle never ends. There’s always the next thing, there’s always someone or something better waiting around the corner to make you feel bad about what you’ve got. I remember thinking so distinctly in my second year of law school, “If we just hit this number for Pete’s salary, it will be enough, we will finally not have to worry about money.” We hit that number and shocker, it was nice, but not enough for everything, not enough to keep me from fantasizing about the next number, the next thing.

I’m finally old enough to realize that envy leaves me empty, unsatisfied, and incapable of enjoying any of the glorious gifts God has given me. I have a long way to go, but I’m recognizing the lie. The belief that everything would be fine if I could just get my hands on the object of my envy is a lie from the pit of hell. You heard me, a lie from the pit of hell. It is a powerful and destructive fallacy. Believing this lie threatens to rob you of recognizing the goodness of God in every corner of your life. Envy will constantly keep you running on the hamster wheel of comparison, whatever that may look like to you. Proverbs 14:30 puts it best, “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.” Freshman year of college, my roommate wrote this quote from Theodore Roosevelt in lipstick on our full-length mirror, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” The relevance and truth of this statement resonated in my mind immediately, but the journey from the mind to the heart is a more complicated endeavor.

A wake up call that I needed to start dealing with this more seriously was when I started envying other babies. I envied babies who were really calm, letting their mom accomplish all sorts of super mom things. I envied babies who slept late in the morning (we are on month four of 5:00 AM wake ups, ugh). I envied babies who ate everything and babies who liked the car seat. At first, I didn’t realize the insidious root of my little thoughts of, “Oh, I wish Penny would sleep in,” or “I wish Penny wouldn’t scream in the car most of the time so I could actually go places.” But as I started unpacking these thoughts, their ugly origin became clear. Ahh! I was letting my propensity to envy invade my sweet relationship with my daughter. Not cool. Time to deal with it. I want to excise this emotion from my heart; I want it over and done.