Obviously love does not envy, but how bad is envy?
Envy starts when you focus too much on what other people seem to have rather than concentrate on your own journey. The laser-focus on others’ possessions makes you pursue ways to get what others have faster and look for all the quick-fix methods. This is manifested in many diet tips, saving tips, investment tips, and study tips. Tips are useful but what will really make your healthy body, seed money, and good grades is consistent effort and hard work put into for a long period of time. There is no short cut. Yet envy makes people believe there is and motivates them to make choices to put focus and hard work in a wrong way.
If the person envied is the one who’s close to us, envy becomes more dangerous. It hurts the relationship because you no longer look at the ‘person’ but only what they have. This does not only ruin the relationship but also makes us miserable because we cannot be happy living with envy for people we love.
Everyone at any age can envy, but it seems that adolescent girls struggle with envy quite a lot. This is the phase most of us go through where we orbit our lives around what others say, how they dress, or what they do. Now with social media, their world of comparison has only become bigger. How, then, can we as parents, help our teenage kids focus on defining their own priorities and values in life without getting distracted with envy for others?
Instead of how-not-to-envy strategies, it would be helpful to change the whole perspective. Our teenagers need to learn to direct their focus to themselves, specifically, their vision, dream, plan, life bucket lists, and finding out who they are. This way, they would physically have less time to think about others’ possessions but also obsession over what others have will feel less important.
More practically, we can definitely model as parents to focus on our journey and not emphasize what others have. With younger children, we can monitor our focus and language around our kids whether it is about others or our own lives. Do we say, “wow, Rachel has this cool gadget, do you want one of those?” Or, do we say “your idea sounds super cool, how are you going to make that work?” Though it seems very small step, it changes the directionality of their thoughts which will make a bigger difference as they get older.
This goes similar with older children. To their envy-full comments, do we focus on things and envy like, “you have all this stuff too! you don’t need that. You have somethings she does not have too” Or, can we say, “that’s cool that she has that, do you really need that too? why?” This is not to criticize but to invite to open discussion. Obviously, we need to monitor ‘how’ we say it because it is not about judging others’ choices but making good choices for ourselves.
We want to make them think for themselves, ‘is this something I really want or I just want this because she has it.’ ‘Is it really worth it to put all my money to buy this new phone, or should I save it for next year’s graduation trip because I really wanted to do extra things on that trip.’ The key is to prompt them to think about who they are, what they really want, and decide where to put their hard work in, shifting their focus on others’ to ‘themselves.’
Perhaps, ‘love does not envy’ starts with loving ourselves. Discovering and defining who we are and loving that person is the first step we can do to love without envy. Only then, we can truly look at other people as beautiful creations of God and be able to love them without envying surface materials they own.
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