The Cure for Envy
Learning to Lean Away from Approval
Every year, at some point in my work or life, a pang erupts in my gut. At first I try to ignore it, pretending I’m better than it or surely I wouldn’t be caught by that particular vice. Then I try to argue with it, give it all kinds of evidence for why I am not the kind of person to struggle with this feeling. Then I try to distract it with all the other people I know who actually struggle with it. Then, instead of the feeling getting distracted I find my own self distracted by all those people are doing with their lives powered by this vice. At this point I realized I’ve been had, trapped, skinned, and et for dinner and dessert.
The feeling is envy.
A friend told me this year that there’s a difference between jealousy and envy. I think she read Brene Brown once saying something like, “Envy is when we want something another person has and jealousy is when we fear losing something we already have to someone else.” The distinction is helpful but it often feels a bit messier when we’re thick in the throes of it.
This week I noticed two of my writing colleagues, both women I respect deeply for their integrity, faithfulness, and wisdom, gathering together for a thing. The thing itself isn’t important, but the feeling I had when I witnessed that wasn’t joy—which surprised me. Joy is my normal emotion when people I love do things they love together. The feeling I had was envy. I wanted to be in “the room where it happened.”
This happened the same day as I read Scot McKnight’s short post on C.S. Lewis’s famous essay on The Inner Ring from The Weight of Glory. I’ve made a practice of rereading this essay once a year or so (usually around the same time this particular vice makes its uncomfortable presence known), and so of course I went and read it again.
Lewis says, “I will ask only one question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. In the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction?”
That invisible line is, of course, the inner ring. Lewis is saying essentially “Has the desire to be on the in ever produced anything good in you?” And I’d add even, “Has crossing the Rubicon of the desire, getting the thing we want, having it, however long or short, has it ever resulted in the keeping of our integrity?” It’s no mistake Lewis draws attention to the small hours of a wakeful night because it is often in those hours that we are kept awake wondering what could have might have would have been different if only we…
Bear with me now, while we veer off the road of Inner Rings and move into the land of Approval.
When I finally decide to sit with that feeling of envy for a few minutes, to let the Lord do some work in me, repent for the sin but also receive healing for the hurt that led me there, what I realize deep within me is that beneath that envy there is a deep and dark and pervasive desire for approval. And this, my friends, is my besetting sin. I want everyone to like me, approve of me, think I’m kind and generous and patient. I want them to see me the way my closest friends see me. I want them to never feel disappointed by me. I want them to never leave me. I would rather sit in the stagnancy of inaction and sloth than to try and fail and alienate those whose approval I want.
I don’t know that I could have identified this sin or struggle in me before the past few years. But as I have risked truly loving others instead of withholding my love to keep myself safe, I’ve learned there is a huge chasm between love and approval. And the more I know what love actually is, the less I care about approval because I’ve learned I don’t need it.
I have spent almost my entire life seeking the approval of leaders around me, wanting their blessing on my life and work. To know that I could disappoint them or fail them was the greatest pain I could imagine. I would take a dismissive pat on my head from an indifferent father-figure if that’s all I could get. I was Oliver Twist at heart, orphaned kid looking for a bit of porridge to call my own. And the times when I was brave enough to ask for it and be given it, it often times failed to give me the sense of security and love I thought it would.
I equated their permission and spoken blessing with being beloved.
God’s mercy to me was to remove the permissive (or non-permissive) presences from my life, to turn me out into a blessing desert, and woo me there in the wilderness (Hosea 2), teaching me I am his beloved and nothing—nothing!—separates me from the love of Christ.
Lewis wrote, “As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.”
God began to teach me to be an outsider. He began to show me that if I leaned not on my own understanding or even the understanding of leaders and pastors and elders, but on God’s understanding, then I could trust he could “lead me to my senses” of his own accord. In the midst of the pigpen of all I thought I wanted, away from the loudest voices of approval, he could still break through and bring me home to him. He began to teach me that his love is not an onion to be peeled, but a pearl to be held. It is a true thing as it is, there is no secret to getting to its core, we open the clamshell and there it is, in all its goodness, all for us.
Envy, when it comes now for me, comes not because I necessarily want what someone else has but because I have forgotten who I am. I am loved. I am loved. I am loved.
I am beloved.
Learning to be an outsider is hard, especially in the beginning. Our necks are accustomed to turning every which way in search of approval and affirmation. We have been told the Bible demands our submission to earthly leaders and requires our unquestioning trust in mere men. We have learned to walk in the dark, putting our feet in their steps of approval, all the time not realizing the darkness we walk in is their shadow, cast long behind them, covering over the light of Jesus trying to get through to us. We don’t know how to trust the good hearts God has given us or to even call our hearts good at all. We believe that trusting in God alone is some sort of perverted version of trusting ourselves and our own “wicked hearts.”
But learning to be an outsider is freedom if we’ll risk it. This is what Jesus—fully God, fully man—came to show us. This is why he went into the wilderness, why he didn’t need the approval of religious leaders or political ones, why he confounded his disciples and loved women and touched lepers and cursed trees and died on one too. He was saying, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life, and the way to me is by learning to be an outsider, learning that my approval and love is the only approval and love that matters.”
It is a risk, it does take courage. I don’t want to pretend it’s easy. It’s sometimes the scariest thing in the world. But the fruit is good and it’s not going to fool you into thinking you’re out the outside of God’s love and have to keep peeling your way in. Jesus peeled the onion for you. It’s already done.
If this post encouraged you, would you forward it to a friend? And maybe encourage them to preorder A Curious Faith too? I’d be so grateful and I hope they’d be so encouraged.
Thank you for writing such a vulnerable account. I relate so much to all of this. Oh that we would know and live more fully in our belovedness.
Thank you for writing this. Convicting and helpful.