Dear Christian Indies,
We’ve all heard the expression, “green with envy.” As a child I never really understood why someone would be “green” with envy, so my immature mind decided the person was turning the color of money. After all, when you are very young, you think money is the only thing there is for people to be envious of one another about.
Of course, as an adult, my thinking is a bit more sophisticated. (Only a bit more! I know! Har, har!) In fact, I didn’t have to grow very much older at all to be able to see that there are many other reasons people become envious.
Social media can really stoke the flames of envy, which is actually rooted in the habit of comparison. Jen was pointing out that she’d seen a writer posting to social media about envy, and I found the dynamics of the exchange, as she presented it, quite interesting. You see, the original poster was complaining that she’d been quite supportive of those in her life while they were experiencing successes, but when it came her time for success, her friends were more or less ghosting her.
I cannot presume to know what this original poster was thinking. After all, I wasn’t even the one to encounter this post – it was Jen. However, I could not help but spot the irony that the person who’d created this post seemed quite envious, herself, of all the “special attention” she believed her friends had been getting, all along.
Contemplating this scenario was a terrific mental exercise for me to work through, as I compared whom I thought I might be in the story – someone who felt envious of all the attention another was getting, as opposed to someone withholding compliments out of what the original poster seemed to think was a “thinly disguised” sense of envy coming off her friends.
This week on the podcast we are going to talk about what envy is and the power of envy – because envy absolutely does have power. Envy has the power to compel you to reach higher, strive harder, achieve more… but it also has the power to make you green, which, I’ve unfortunately discovered, is the feeling of just plain illness. After all, someone who is green is likely about to vomit – something my child’s brain didn’t really comprehend, but that my adolescent mind learned altogether too well.
Looking forward to chatting with you all about the power of envy,
Jamie
