I’ve been comparing myself to people. I want to be careful how I say that, because it isn’t competing. I’m not trying to beat anyone. I don’t want what they have so much as I notice it. Who seems settled. Who seems close to God without visibly working at it. Who looks like they know what their life is for. I’m not keeping score. I’m just looking.
The other thing that’s true, and I haven’t said it plainly yet, is that I’ve been less happy lately. Not dramatically. Nothing has gone wrong that I could point to. It’s more that the color has gone down a shade, and I keep noticing it at the end of the day, when there’s nothing left to be busy with.
I can’t tell which came first. Maybe the looking is wearing me down, one small comparison at a time, the way water wears a step. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe I was already low, and the looking is how I’ve been trying to get back up. Studying the people who seem to be where I want to be, as if their lives were a map and I could find the path back by watching how they walk it.
I honestly don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth on it all week.
There’s a moment at the very end of John that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Jesus has just restored Peter, three questions for three denials, feed my sheep. It’s the most personal conversation in the whole gospel. And Peter, right in the middle of being put back together, turns around and sees John following them.
Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do?
He isn’t competing either. I don’t read any envy in it. He’s just looking. He has just been told something hard about his own future, and his first instinct is to check how it’s going for the person next to him.
Jesus’s answer is almost blunt. If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me.
What strikes me isn’t the rebuke. It’s what Jesus is pulling Peter’s eyes back to. Not stop looking so much as look here. Peter’s restoration wasn’t going to be found in John’s life. It was in the conversation he was already having, with the person he was already standing next to.
If the looking really is my way of trying to come back up, then maybe that’s the problem with it. Not that it’s sinful exactly, but that I’m searching other people’s lives for a way back that was never going to be in them. Their nearness to God is theirs. It can’t be borrowed by watching closely enough.
Paul has a line about it too, quieter than John’s: let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another. Rejoicing. It’s the word I’ve been missing. I hadn’t noticed that he connects joy to not measuring yourself by someone else.
I don’t think I’m going to stop noticing people. I’m not sure I’m supposed to. But I want to notice when I’ve turned around in the middle of my own conversation to check on someone else’s.
A couple of Sundays ago I wrote about a drift I hadn’t named. Maybe this is part of the same thing. It’s easier to watch people walking toward God than to walk toward him myself. Watching feels like participating. It isn’t.
Follow thou me. Not them. Me. I think that’s the whole sentence I needed this week.