Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

comparison

When Comparisons Are Choking the Life Out of You

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Grass Path Prairie

I sent my husband a text yesterday. A really short text, comprised of just a symbol and a number:

#268,304.

I didn’t need to elaborate. Brad knew. This is the kind of conversation we’ve been having for a while now.

“I would love you the same if you only sold one,” he texted right back.

I smiled. My husband’s patience and encouragement is as deep as the Mariana Trench.

#268,304 was my Amazon book rank that day. It’s been rising steadily since my memoir, Spiritual Misfit, was published back in April, and as I’ve had to remind my mother, “Bigger is not better,” at least when it comes to your book’s Amazon rank.

I’d love to tell you that I’m okay with this, that I’ve surrendered the book to God and am at peace knowing everything is in his good and gracious hands. But that wouldn’t be the whole truth.

…I’m so grateful and excited to be over at Lisa-Jo Baker’s house today, writing about wrestling with the green-eyed monster…See you over there…

The Life God has Ordained for You

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We stood side-by-side in front of the case, the lunch crowd pressing loud and boisterous behind us. My friend bent down, hands on her knees, to admire the delicate chocolate confections arranged in perfect rows behind the glass. Her hair fell in gentle waves over her shoulders. I watched the man with the white apron tied around his waist watch my friend. Her eyes, blue like the Caribbean, settled on a dark chocolate truffle. His eyes settled on her.

“You like? You want to try, for free?” the man with the apron asked, sliding a truffle from the tray. He looked like an expectant puppy as he handed my friend the chocolate, waiting for her approval, her delight. My friend’s eyes darted toward mine before she took a dainty bite. The man with the white apron didn’t offer a free chocolate to me.

…I’m writing about comparison over at Laura Rath’s place. Will you join me over there?  

When You’re Yearning for a Place in the In-Crowd

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It began with a rejection.

A guest post I’d submitted to an online community I admire was rejected. This is standard, I realize, for the writing profession. Not every article, not every book, not every blog post will be accepted. But still. It hurts. Rejection always makes me doubt myself and my abilities. It always makes me feel less-than. And it always fuels the hot flames of comparison.

Turned out, though, the rejection itself wasn’t the real problem. The real issue was that I wanted to belong. I wanted to part of the “in crowd.”

You wouldn’t think there’d be an in-crowd in Christian blogging, would you? But there is. There’s an in-crowd everywhere – in every school, in every office, in every church, in every community. Like every in-crowd, if you’re part of it, you may not even realize it. But if you’re not part of the in-crowd, you know it.

I scrolled through the names and photos listed on the contributors pages of that online community. I read the bios, many of which I’ve read before, more than once. I wanted my picture there. I wanted my bio there. I wanted to belong there. I wanted what everyone listed there seemed to have.

If I belonged there, it would be enough, I thought to myself as I scrolled. I would be fulfilled. Satisfied. Content. Confident. Being a member of that group, that in-crowd, would fix everything.

I know this is baloney. Intellectually I know this isn’t how it works. Even if I were a member of that group, or that community, or that in-crowd, I’d still be clamoring for more. My head knows this. But my heart does not.

“Do your best in the job you received from the Master. Do your very best.” (Colossians 4:17)

Paul wrote that advice to a fellow named Archippus. I don’t know who Archippus was or what his job was, but it sounds to me like he might have been feeling a little down, a little frayed around the edges, a little defeated. It sounds perhaps like Archippus might have been clamoring for a little more; that perhaps he was straining against the job he’d received from the Master, wishing for a different, better job. Paul was reminding a disgruntled Archippus to focus on the job God gave him – not on someone else’s job, not on what everyone else was doing, but on the job given especially to him.

I made myself a picture with the words of that verse. I drove over to Hobby Lobby and bought a spool of red ribbon to match, and Brad fixed a strip of it to the back of the frame. When the glue dried, I hung the picture on a hook right next to my desk. I can see the words as I type.

Every day, every hour that I’m at my desk, I come back to those words, repeating them like a prayer. Those words refocus my heart and my mind on my role, the one God has especially designed for me.

I think, if we’re honest, that we all yearn to be part of the in-crowd at one time or another. Maybe you’re lucky and you haven’t felt that desire since the eighth grade. Maybe, like me, you’re feeling it right now. Maybe you’re looking at those moms in the super-cute platform sandals and the perfectly flat-ironed hair, or those colleagues who seem to be climbing the ladder and in-like-flynn with the boss, and you’re thinking, I want that. I want to be there. I want to be one of those people.

Please, though, do yourself a favor. Give yourself this gift. Remind yourself that God has a job especially designed just for you and that your mission is to do that job to the very best of your ability. Every day. No matter what anyone else is doing or accomplishing. No matter what everyone else’s job is.

God has a job with your name on it.

Remind yourself of that truth again and again, every hour if you need to, until you believe it. Not only in your head, but in your heart.

4 Steps to Living a Spacious Life

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When Holley Gerth asked us to put our dream down on paper a few weeks ago at the Jumping Tandem Retreat, I didn’t do it. After all, I figured I already have a dream, this writing/publishing dream. I’m still working on that one, right? I don’t need another dream, do I? So I sat quietly in my seat with my pen in my lap and watched as everyone else in the room wrote out their dream on paper.

Later that weekend I listened in the third row as Jennifer Dukes Lee spoke about the feeling of not being “enough.” She asked us to write a word on a rock – a word that signified what was holding us back, what was gripping us with fear like a gloved hand around our throats in the dark of night. I wrote “comparison” on my rock.

Comparison.

Comparing my words with others’.

Comparing my number of readers, my number of Facebook likes.

Comparing how many speaking engagements I have lined up on my schedule compared to her or her or her. 

Jennifer told us she and her daughters were going to hurl each of those rocks to the bottom of an Iowa lake. She would drown my comparison beneath ten feet of water, bury it under a mound of pond sludge. I was good with that.

Home from the conference, I cracked open my Bible. It had been a while. I’d left off in Second Corinthians.

“I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life,” I read. “…The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way … Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively.”(2 Corinthians 6:11-13)

And there it was: my dream. The one I didn’t even know I had, laid out in black and white where I never expected to find it.

I wanted what was written right there on the pages of my Bible. I didn’t want to live in a small way anymore. I wanted to live openly and expansively. I wanted to enter the wide-open, spacious life. THAT was my dream.

I’ve been living small, friends. Cramped and crumpled into myself, turned inward, caught up in comparison, crowded by expectations, lured by the enticements of this world: sales, success, being known, being valued.

This inward-focus? It’s not a spacious place. It’s not a wide-open, expansive place. It’s a small, cold, lonely, bitter place.

After I read those verses from Second Corinthians and I stared my dream in the face, my dream of living not small and crumpled inward, but openly and expansively, I wondered what that might look like and feel like, in real, everyday life.

Here’s what I came up with. Here the list I made in my journal that day:

Wide-open, spacious living feels: Free. Secure. Joyful. Light. Unburdened. Enough. Content. Not heavy with guilt or “not enough.” Hopeful. God-focused. Like an open prairie, rather than a crushing crowd.

And then, beneath that, I made second list: steps to take when I find myself turning inward again, when I revert, as Paul says, to living life in a small way:

1. Turn off: from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and all social media. Physically shut down the mechanisms that are fueling comparison and smallness and “not enough.”

2. Turn outward: Shine the spotlight via praise or kind words on someone else, either online or in real life.

3. Turn to now: Focus on the right now — your family, your husband, your friends, the small moments. Enjoy the beauty of your place right now. Enjoy what’s happening in your writing and publishing journey right now. Focus on what you can do today and know that it is enough.

4. Turn to God: In gratitude, prayer and thanksgiving. Thankfulness is the seed of satisfaction.

That’s it. My four steps to living a wide-open, spacious life:

Turn off.

Turn outward.

Turn to now.

Turn to God. 

I’m trying it. I’m committed to it. This wide-open, spacious life sounds too good to miss.

So what about you? What’s keeping you from living the wide-open, spacious life God wants for you? Can you make your own list of steps to take when you find yourself living small and cramped? Do you want to be brave and maybe say out loud, right here, what’s holding you back from living wide-open? I’m with you. You know that, right?

The Whiny Pants Post

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“Mommy, are you famous?” he asks, as I butter a bagel still hot from the toaster oven.

I laugh a little bit. “No honey, I’m definitely not famous.”

“Well, are you famous in Lincoln then?” he asks.

“Nope, not in Lincoln.”

“What about in our church; are you famous in our church?”

“Honey,” I stop buttering and turn around to look Noah straight in the eye, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not famous anywhere.”

He looks disappointed.

“Really, though, I don’t care much about being famous,” I add. “I’m happy just to write for a few people, knowing that God is glad that I write about him.”

I felt pretty good after that conversation, confident that I’d helped my son understand that there are qualities more important than fame to pursue in life.

Except for one problem…

Turns out that story I gave Noah about fame was a bunch of bull-oney.

I didn’t lie intentionally. In fact, at the time I really did believe that a desire for fame played no part in my writing. In fact I didn’t even know it was baloney until a couple of weeks after that conversation, when “the lists” were published.

It started with Kent Shaffer’s list of Top 200 Church Blogs, followed by his list of Top Christian Women Bloggers, which he published largely in response to the question of why so few female bloggers are included in the original list [a disclaimer here: I was sort-of included on that list, as a contributing writer for The High Calling].
Then, as a response to Shaffer’s lists, Sarah Bessey published her own list of 50 Church and Faith Lady-Bloggers, based on the following criteria:

“Lady Bloggers that love Jesus, make beautiful art, challenge the Church, and wrestle with theology and generally influence the Church far and wide – with or without a power ranking badge on their website.”

And then, as a response to that list, Diana Trautweinpublished a list of 21 Church and Faith Lady-Bloggers over 50 (with an additional five bloggers close to age 50) at Sarah’s place, noting that this group is even more marginalized in the world of Christian blogging.

So (if you’re still with me) here’s the ugly part:

I scrolled through all the lists with the sole purpose of seeing who was included and whether or not I made the cut. 

I know, I know. It’s gross. Even admitting this gives me the hives. But it’s the truth. Worse, I scrolled through all the comments, too, to see if anyone mentioned me there. And then, to top it all off, I berated myself for not being gracious like the bloggers who weren’t included on the lists but posted encouraging, cheerful comments anyway.

I tried to climb onto my holy soapbox by telling myself that I blog for God alone, but the pit that persisted in my gut told me that’s not the whole truth. Yes, I write for God. I write because it helps me glimpse God and live out my faith in the everyday. I write for community. I write because I love to write and because I love to tell stories.
But I know something else now: I write for fame, too. I want to be included. I want to be noted and noticed.

Despite the hivey horror of this admission, two positive results have come of this:

  1. I realized I’m guilty of the same thing around here. As of 9 p.m. yesterday, Graceful included a blogroll over in the right column. I called it “Great Reads.” So how did I decide who was included and who wasn’t? How did I decide who qualified as a “great read” and who didn’t? Yesterday I wondered if I ever hurt a fellow writer who didn’t see himself or herself included in my “Great Reads” list. I don’t know for sure. But I’m guessing probably yes.
  2. I realized I need to pray about this. Seriously. I need to ask God for assistance on this one, to help me focus my writing on him and him alone and to let the comparisons with other writers go, once and for all.

I’m not famous. But I know now that at least a part of me wants to be. And I suspect I seek fame for all the wrong reasons.

What about you? Do you ever crave fame?

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