It Started on a Monday

It is Friday afternoon and Dev is standing in the office kitchen waiting on the microwave, which has forty seconds left and is making the sound it makes.

He has had, by any account, a bad week. Not a dramatic one. Nothing happened. He rewrote a four-line message on Tuesday until it had no words left in it that were his. He was short with a young woman on Wednesday over something that did not matter, and he heard his own voice doing it and could not stop it. He lay awake most of Thursday night conducting an argument with a person who was not in the room and had not said the thing he was arguing with. And when his wife asked him on Thursday how the week was going, he said it was just busy, which was true and which was also not remotely the answer.

Renata comes in and rinses a mug at the sink.

"You surviving?" she says.

"Just busy," Dev says.

She dries the mug on the towel that hangs off the oven handle and puts it upside down on the rack with the others, and she says something about how the light comes through those blinds in the afternoon and makes stripes all over the counter, and how she never noticed it until this week.

And it lands on him. All at once, standing there, with the microwave counting down.

Monday. Nine forty in the morning. Right here at this counter. Renata was telling somebody, not even him, that her whole family had been at her place on Sunday. Twenty of them. And that they do it every month, and have for eleven years, and that her mother cooks too much every single time and everybody takes containers home.

He had said, "That's nice." He had genuinely meant it. He had refilled his cup and gone back to his desk and thought about a spreadsheet, and the whole thing was gone out of his head in ninety seconds, the way a stone is gone out of your hand once you have dropped it down a well.

Except it was not gone. It went down and down, and the whole week has been the sound of it hitting things on the way.

Dev stands there. The microwave beeps and he does not open it. He is looking at the stripes of light on the counter and doing the arithmetic backward, Friday to Thursday to Wednesday to Tuesday, all the way back to a Monday morning and four seconds and a woman talking about her mother's kitchen, and he is thinking, that was it. That was the whole thing. That was where it started, and I never even knew I had picked it up.

Where the week actually started

There is a sentence in James that people quote as an accusation and it was never one. It is a map.

For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.James 3:16

Read the direction of travel. Envying comes first. Confusion comes after. James is not standing over anybody with a finger out; he is telling you where to look when your week has come apart and you cannot find a reason for it in the week. The disorder is downstream. Something got in on Monday and the wreckage showed up Wednesday, and by Wednesday it had changed clothes so completely that it looked like a personality problem.

That is the mercy in the verse, and almost nobody hears it as mercy. It means the mess was not you. It means there is a cause, and the cause has a date and a time on it.

You are not a jealous man with a bad character, and the week you just had was a symptom rather than a verdict. I am not being generous with you to be kind. James 3:16 is written as a diagnosis of where confusion comes from, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line like that and walks a person backward down four days to a counter and a microwave and a Monday morning at nine forty.

And I want to say the next thing carefully, because this is where articles about comparison usually turn on the reader.

The looking was not a crime. Dev did not do anything wrong at that counter. He heard a woman describe a kitchen full of her own people and something in him went toward it, and going toward it is what a living thing does. The trouble was never that he looked. The trouble is that he put it down without ever telling anyone what it was, including himself, and a hunger nobody names does not go away. It goes underground and runs the week from down there.

You have permission to have felt it, and no part of your standing with God moved when you did. Scripture never once makes His welcome depend on a person's chest staying quiet when someone else's good life walks past, and the Spirit of God has been living inside people with exactly that reflex for two thousand years without packing His bags.

What the comparison was reporting

Here is what I think is really going on in that four seconds, and I have watched it in enough kitchens to say it plainly.

Comparison is not usually a wish to take something off somebody. It is a hunger that has found a picture. You did not want Renata's Sunday. You wanted the thing her Sunday was made of, and you have wanted it a long time, and until she said it out loud you did not have a picture for it. The picture is what made it unbearable, because a hunger with no picture is a dull ache and a hunger with a picture has an address.

So the comparison was doing something useful and doing it in the worst possible way. It was telling you what you are actually hungry for. It just told you by pointing at somebody else's table, and that is the part that poisons it.

Now watch what God does with that, because it is not what anybody expects. He does not take the picture away. He does not talk you down out of the wanting. He answers it.

You are being fed for the very hunger that went looking on Monday morning, and He is not asking you to want a smaller thing first. Psalm 107:9 says He satisfies the longing soul and fills the hungry soul with goodness, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about longing and points it back at the man rather than at the woman he was comparing himself to.

And nothing here is a rule about where you look. You were never handed a discipline about your own eyes as the price of peace. The written word answers envy with a Person and a table rather than with a policy, and the Spirit of God is not standing behind you monitoring what you notice about other people's lives. He is putting food in front of you.