Spiritual Envy

I have an emptiness that tugs at me, even when I’m not worried about money or a family member or if one of my daughters is getting her feelings hurt at school. It’s spiritually based, and yet the feeling isn’t spiritual at all. The uncomfortable emptiness is envy. I’m very familiar with envy and frequently find myself envying random people for their larger houses or toned upper arms or lives as stay-at-home mothers. Frequently when I’m in this state of my mind I can catch myself, realize that jealousy has no payoff and think about something else.

But the spiritual envy is hard to shake off. It’s easy for me to know that I can’t be fulfilled by having 1000 more square feet of house, but it’s almost impossible for me to know that I can’t be fulfilled by having a stronger spiritual center. Of course I’d be more content and more useful if my relationship with God were stronger. Of course I’d help more people find faith if I had more faith. It makes sense for me to have what I want spiritually…but I don’t have it.

I want to be like my friend Kristen, who is the most positive person I’ve ever known. She thinks about love, talks about love and wears clothes and jewelry that remind her of love. If I had seen her huge pink faux gemstone ring in a store I would have flinched, but on her it’s just part of the entire “love package” she sends out to the world each day. I want to be like Alexis who loves her church, has her deepest friendships through her church and doesn’t talk about Christianity unless you bring it up. But then she speaks about it quietly and steadily, and you know that it’s the foundation of her peaceful, mother-of-three-boys existence. I want to be like Courtney, who is a born again Christian and always talks about Christ and always brings up her beliefs. I want to be like Mary, who is either muttering or smiling and cracking jokes – until you start to talk about God. Then she becomes sober and intense and tells you the hard truths: that for her there is no life without dependence on God, that her beliefs about herself and her place in life create her future and that she struggles every day to find gratitude and claim it as her reality.

The people I have just written about have real faith that directs their lives. As I go about my life, God is the most important thing in it, and yet I feel like I’m just pretending to have a relationship with him. That is where my spiritual envy comes from. I look at the spirituality of others, and it seems authentic. I look at mine, and it seems forced.

At the same time, I have had spiritual experiences so amazing that when I put them into words, they read like fantasy. But they were real, and each one was so overwhelming it seemed to suffocate me at the time. When I’m feeling jealous of other people and the way their love for God is expressed, it helps to remember that he has chosen me to witness some spectacular works. It helps, but the emptiness doesn’t go away.

I have started this blog for a very simple reason: I want to talk about God. My hope is that this blog will become service work just as my prayers for others are service work. My hope is that becoming even more engrossed in my spiritual life will take away the feeling that my relationship with him is not enough, and the feeling that if I really loved him and lived for him that my life would look like something else. My hope is that I attract readers and that he reveals ways for me to express my faith in ways I had never thought of.

For everyone reading this, thank you for coming, and I pray that you will come back often, with all of us stronger in our faith.