You’ve experienced the moment before: Someone got something you didn’t get, and you wanted it for yourself. In that moment, what you were experiencing was jealousy. Maybe you worked through your jealousy and moved on with your life. Maybe, though, you got stuck on it and it became something that began impacting that relationship. Jealousy can make a mess in our relationships. As we get to the end of our teaching series, Stormy Waters, we are talking about one last potent contributor to our family conflicts. Let’s talk about jealousy, what it is, and how to avoid it.
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Have you ever been around people who are just…content. They have things, but those things don’t have them. They never seem to be affected by what the people around them have…or what the people around them acquire. Hard circumstances might trouble them, but they don’t seem to overly burden them. There are certainly things they value, but they seem to be able to see a value in those things that goes beyond the things themselves such that if they suddenly didn’t have those things for some reason, they aren’t going to come unraveled over that. Now, on the one hand, these kinds of folks can be really hard to be around because they sometimes serve as a magnifying glass on all the places where we aren’t like that. We don’t like standing in front of mirrors that highlight our known flaws. At the same time, though, these are the kinds of people we want to be around because they carry with them a kind of promise that we can be better than we are. They give us an enacted vision of who we could be. They show us that a life free from the burdens and worries that so often drag us down really is a possibility. The truth is, though, that contentment like that is a hard mark to hit.
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The Nexus 