Phil Inglis - February 28, 2021
Alternate Success
I’ve spent time in developing nations where the average wage is $70 a week or less. That’s 10 times LESS than the MINIMUM wage in Australia! If money is a measure of success, then pretty much all Australians are more successful than the average person living in one of those countries. The truth is, however, that many Australians do not feel particularly successful, and many people in low-income countries feel incredibly successful. The difference is we often measure our success by comparing ourselves with others around us. The closer they are, the more weight their success has. If you and your siblings play soccer, and you win 4 trophies, but your sister wins 6, you are likely to feel less successful even though you won 4 more trophies than most other people in Australia. If you and your husband are into competitive baking and he wins a gold medal for a batch of cookies and you win a silver for a cake, then you are more likely to see yourself as less successful, even though you achieved more than most other people in Australia. If you and your friends play regularly in an e-sports competition of hundreds of players, and they end up playing in the semi final, while you got knocked out in the quarter-finals, you will feel less successful even though you made it higher than most other people in Australia. If you live in a beautiful 4-bedroom home but your neighbours all live in houses twice as big, with beautiful expensive cars, boats, and children, you will tend to feel less successful, even though you have more than most of the population of planet earth. It is basic human nature to judge our own success by comparing ourselves with others, and we compare ourselves most critically with those closest to us, our families, friends, and neighbours. The tendency to value ourselves against those closest to us can lead us to a place in our lives when we become extra critical of others, to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. When we are critical of others, even in our own minds, we consider them less successful and therefore less valuable. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus explains that the root problem is that we do not understand our own value. We do not have confidence in our own worth, so we feel compelled to measure it. So, Jesus presents an alternate (holy) way of understanding our own value which leads us to a radically different way of experiencing life.
Scripture References: Matthew 7:1-5, Matthew 7:1-5
