Jealousy

Jealousy is a tricky emotion. It's poison to the believer because it opens the heart to a host of other sinful emotions and attitudes. Consequently, envy must be dealt with immediately ... before it has the opportunity and time to take root and grow up into something we can't manage.

King Saul's jealousy so distorted his thought processes that he eventually became an embittered fool and destroyed his relationship with David, and left him separated from God. The problem actually began when the people praised David more highly than the king, Saul. They sang, "Saul has slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands" (1Sam 18:7 NIV). The king became suspicious and began watching for signs that David might be subverting Saul and his royal position. Saul never found any actual evidence but his clouded thinking mistook any success in the young soldier's life as reason for resentment and resentment fostered a reason for rage. Bitterness and fear festered like a blister until Saul was willing to take David's life just to set his mind to rest.

But I could never go as far as Saul did, we think to ourselves. We mustn't be so sure. Jealousy is a powerful emotion capable of great harm. We simply can't say what we'd do if we were given free reign. That's why it's critical to deal with jealousy as soon as it rears its ugly head, just as soon as we recognize it. We need to examine our hearts and determine if there's anyone who elicits feelings of bitterness, suspicion, hostility, or resentment. Then we must prayerfully submit those feelings to the Lord. Jealousy and resentment are poisonous emotions that simply do not fit, in fact they run totally against, who we are in Christ. Even a little poison can be dangerous to our Christian walk, and harboring such attitudes for any period of time is too long. We must do what we can and turn over the rest to our heavenly Father who is so much stronger and wiser than we are.

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Slept late this morning so my blog is running late. I had my alarm set early but just turned over and went back to sleep. I know, shame on me! My meeting for today got put off until tomorrow so now I'll need to set my alarm for tomorrow morning so I'll have time to write my blog before going over to Evelyn's house for the meeting. I have nine more blogs to write before making the changes I have planned. I must have really miscounted the number of blogs I have left because I thought I only had about 10 written ahead of time and that was last week. Oh well, it gives me more time to get things written ahead of time. I'm afraid I'm going to run into trouble coming up with titles for my blogs again after I change them. Oh well, I'll figure that out when the time comes. And I haven't yet figured out how I'm going to break it up into daily segments. What I've written I've written as just one long 20+ page length blog and that will never work.

I don't have any special plans for today. A little housework and washing and styling my hair are about the only things I've thought of for today. Yesterday Gerry and I spent two hours going over the attendance records, trying to mark the ones that have moved away or died. Who needs cards sent occasionally and who don't. We changed pastors a couple years ago and some people got upset over the change and they dropped their membership. Others don't like our worship style (too loud, but I don't know what that means exactly) but mostly it's just people getting out of the habit of attending church. It would be wonderful to get a lot of those people back. Well I guess this about does it for today. I have some errands that need to be run and I'm going to have to do my hair before I take off and do those so I better close off here and let you get to your pressing needs, too. Michael just came out and turned on the TV so I can't think anymore with that on. I think he's losing some of his hearing because he's got to where he really turns up the TV. Drives me and my hearing aids batty! Personally, I'm all for leaving the TV off all day and just turning it on for the evening shows. The only thing on TV these days anyway is politics and I'm so tired of politics I could puke. (Sorry for getting graphic there.) Michael just left the room so I took that as my cue to get up and turn down the TV. One of the problems is that for some reason, we always have our TV on a little louder in the evenings and so when we turn it on in the daytime, it comes on too loud. And if I comment to Michael he thinks I'm criticizing him (which I'm not) so it's easier to just be sneaky about it and turn it down whenever I get the chance. I don't know why we have it turned so loud at night. For one thing the people next door are home in the evenings and we use the TV to drown out some of their noises. (We live in a duplex.) They seem to enjoy hitting or bumping our common wall. Okay that's going to do it for me for today. Things to do. People to see. Places to go. Until tomorrow ... Oh, and if something happens that I don't get to my blog in the morning, I'll probably just skip the day instead of trying to write later in the day. Okay, that's it ... bye ...