Stop Comparing

 

I am so guilty of this.  It is easier to fall into this trap than any other that I am tempted with.  It is so easy to look around at other women and see all the ways that they are better than I am.  It is easy to believe that they are more righteous, more willing, more happy, more holy.  More of just about anything I can imagine. 

The problem with that is that as long as I continue to believe it, I do not change.  I do not recognize my own strengths and use them to help others.  I just keep telling myself that "Sister So-and-So" can do it so much better than me.  I hold myself back and don't serve, when I really want to and need to be there for someone else. 

The problem with comparisons, is that they are NEVER true!  We are standing at the outside trying to look inside somebody else, and we are looking at our inside and comparing it to our own perception of someone else.  We can never win.  We either believe erroneously that we are better, or worse. 

We start to believe that we are not the same in God's eyes.  That He sees us with the harshness that we see ourselves.  We forget that He looks upon the heart and not the deeds.  He looks at what we are becoming and overcoming and not so much on the where we have been. 

He forgives when our own selves can't. 

Happiness is found when we stop trying to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and start trying to see ourselves through our Heavenly Father's eyes.  He loves us, exactly where we are right now, and who we are this minute.  He loves us in all our imperfect weakness as well as the attempts at becoming stronger than we are and more like Him. 

True happiness lies when we can accept ourselves, with all our mistakes and failures, while no longer judging ourselves against the world,

and working at becoming more like Him.

Happiness is looking at each other through the eyes of God.