Speaker: Vince Klassen
There is nothing quite so frustrating than showing up with some big news, only to be upstaged by someone close to us: “Guess what? I was accepted to law school!” only to hear “That’s great, I got into law school at Harvard.” Really? What does one actually say to that? Suddenly my news is dying on the side of the conversation about you getting into Harvard.
But this doesn’t just happen around what school you got into. Think of all the places where someone is one step ahead of us:
- What we have: our houses, our families, our possessions
- What we can do: our skills, our talents, our abilities
- What “hand we were dealt”: what we were born into, what our early experiences were, what group we were a part of.
Any one of those can spark a moment where someone else, is, well, better than us.
And that feeling, of someone being better than us, has been widely examined — including by our spiritual ancestors in the 10 Commandments through this language that says “Don’t Covet”. What do you mean Don’t Covet? What if they got my dream job, or the perfect chin, or grew up with money? How am I supposed to not want those things if I feel like I don’t have them?
Is it wrong to long for something we don’t have? Our spiritual ancestors said it is but, as we have seen in this series, it might not be that black and white.
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