In October of 2009, I traveled to the great state of Colorado, specifically the cities of Denver and Colorado Springs. I had decided to do a big road trip to Colorado and Texas, do some mountain biking in the Springs, make some new friends, and then travel to the Dallas/Fort Worth area to visit some old friends. I arrived in Denver and stayed with my friend Jeremiah and met his then fiancée (now wife) Sarah, as well as friends Andrew and his wife. We had a great time of hanging out, teasing my friend Jeremiah, and playing the game apples to apples. The next evening I traveled to Colorado Springs and stayed with my friend Wes.
There was a terrible and equally unusual fog that fell right before my trip down, so the whole hour drive down was quite arduous. I followed the taillights of the car in front of me and thought to myself several times, ‘Gee, if this car goes off into the ditch, I’ll more than likely unwittingly follow the car into the ditch.’ The heavy fog caused me to flash back to when I was a kid and we took a road trip through the Talamina Drive that runs from Oklahoma into Arkansas. There was a fog that time, too, and there were these white birds known as egrets whose feathers had become too damp to fly with. This caused the birds to tragically encounter the tires of our Jeep Cherokee. My father hit several of these birds. The car in front of us hit a few more than we did. My father was quite jealous the driver ahead of us had a few more tallies. But I digress.
I made it to my friend Wes’ house and stayed with him. The next day I set out for adventure on my mountain bike. I had a blast riding different trails. Eventually, I decided to visit the U.S. Air Force Academy and traverse their scenic trails. At one point, I stopped by the visitor center to take a quick tour and grab some souvenirs for my parents. I was walking around the information center and reading different posters. One of the posters read something to the tune of making your parents and family proud by coming to the academy and making something of yourself that would be quite noteworthy. It was in that moment that I wondered to myself if my parents were proud of me.
And there in lied the problem I was not aware that I had: Comparative worth.
For a few years I had struggled with the idea that I am behind in life as well as that I am not as accomplished as I perceive I should be. If someone had a job that made more money than I do I wondered why I was not making more money, if someone had a home I wondered as to why I had not achieved a home, and if someone seemed more influential or clever than me I wondered why I was not just as much the same. I compared myself to everyone – specifically, people I did not even know – the people I compared myself to were not in my sphere of relationships.
And the problem is that my measuring stick was a blank ruler. There were no tallies to tell me where I should measure up to or how much I had achieved. I did not even know how long my ruler was. The trap I had snared myself in caused me to measure myself up against everyone, so it would make sense that the ruler would need to change to accommodate the person I was comparing myself to. I was comparing myself by impossible standards to immeasurable lengths. And to make everything a little more complicated, I wasn’t even sure whom I was measuring myself to. I did not compare myself to my friends, yet I did compare myself to people I heard about. These people I heard about were strangers that I had never personally met, yet I wondered why I was not as successful as their stories seemed to purport.
To go back to the thought I had at the Air Force Academy of whether or not my parents were proud of me: My parents have always been very supportive of me. They have always loved me and told me they were proud of me. If I told them I was going to barrel myself over Niagara Falls they would vehemently object, then I would wear them down, promise to wear elbow pads and a cup, and that simple assurance would serve to ease their troubled minds.
As far as accomplishment, I am the first person in my family history to graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree, and this extends to my aunts, uncles and cousins. I am the first person in my family to pursue a master’s degree that I will finish up in the next year to year and a half. I have a great job at the major university I work at in Tulsa, OK. I have been entrusted with mentoring students, discipling young men, helping young men grow into mature manhood, and the list could go on.
And for some reason, I did not think I had accomplished anything. And the demon in the midst of this delusion is that I could not see the accomplishments God had wrought in my life because I was comparing myself to everyone else. It is demonic to engage in comparative worth. I felt like I was a failure because I did not own my own business. I felt like a failure because there were not a few more zeros in my net pay every year. I felt like a failure because I did not own a home. Really, the failure that I was really engaging in was not seeing what I had and the lives God was working through me to change and better.
So, this thought of wondering if my parents were proud of me coupled with comparing myself to others lingered with me. I traveled from Colorado Springs to Dallas a couple of days later and stayed with my friend John. John and I went out to run some errands and eventually we met up with his now fiancée’s pastor from India. This was a delightful gentleman with a tremendous heart. You can sense his pastoral calling in the way he engages with people and shares his own testimony of how God has blessed his walk of faith. We sat at Panera Bread and this pastor asked to pray for John.
He prayed for John and to my surprise he began to pray for me. And while he is praying he made a few statements. One was that God had called me to teach His word, and I was not to stop doing so. The second mentioned that God was proud of me for who I was and how I have turned out. Obviously, God was trying to bring something to the surface.
I eventually left Dallas and came back to Tulsa. That following weekend I attended a men’s retreat. The night of the retreat a pastor was sharing about the problem of comparative worth. He spoke of how he had finally got the pastoral job he wanted, but then he began pushing himself harder and harder to achieve the nebulous concept of “more.” The problem was, he did not know what more was. This seemed oddly familiar as I did not know what the “more” I needed to accomplish in my own life was. He mentioned that he had become extremely stressed out, lying awake at night in a semi-panic with his mind racing on how he was to accomplish the impossible task of measuring up. He stated that he had become somewhat aloof to his family as he worked more and more. He went on to say that our only responsibility was to love God and make disciples. This was a ground-breaking thought for me. All I had to do was love God.
And that night, I lay awake in my cot in the cabin I was bunking. I lay there apologizing to God for trying to measure up. I apologized for comparing myself and wrapping my worth up in that instead of simply loving God. And then I asked God as to how I could love Him better. I then realized that I was still trying “to do” and “measure up” and in this “measuring up” I was trying to earn God’s love and/or respect instead of just loving God, so I rolled over and went to sleep to escape my circular thinking.
The next morning we arose and fellowshipped and shared some of our thoughts from the night before. I shared how I had realized I had a problem with comparative worth. I had been comparing myself to others. The problem was that I did not know whom I was comparing myself to. Furthermore, I had no idea what the measurement of “success” was. I did not even know what success looked like as I was comparing myself to other people I did not even know, and I had no idea where on the measuring stick I was trying to be.
A gentleman in the room heard what I said about “measuring up” and shared a vision that God had deposited into his heart of a courtroom. In this courtroom he stood on trial. He looked at the jury that was deciding his fate and found the curious and somewhat eery scene of jurors with no faces. He did not know who he was allowing to judge him. But then Jesus came into the courtroom as his lawyer and was able to clear him of the jury’s decision. Jesus put his arm around the man’s shoulders and led him out of the courtroom. The man turned back to look at the jury as he exited. In the vision, he turned back not because he wanted one last look, but because he was more familiar and comfortable with being judged by a faceless jury than he was being forgiven and pardoned of his sin.
And if you are like I was and need to break out of trying to “measure up,” you might find it easier to judge yourself as opposed to letting Jesus set the standard measurement for your life.
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