What to Do When Life’s Not Fair

Posted on Aug 07, 2018 Topic :
Posted by : Tilly Dillehay

I do not like unfairness. I really don’t.

If things were up to me, I would have every baby born into the equivalent of a Monopoly game, with an identical collection of bills in incremental amounts:

500 units of relational security
100 units of brains
50 units of beauty
25 units of inherited wealth
10 units of diligence
5 units of creative ability

There you go! Out into the world with you, babies! Go enjoy a life in which no one has any advantage over you and you are never made to feel inferior to anyone else.

We are all preoccupied with fairness, to some degree. Children say it aloud (“that’s not fair!”), but adults think it, using different and more sophisticated words (“Wow! The Millers are in Sacramento this week! What is this, a vacation from all the vacations? Talk about first world problems…”).

We are comfortable complaining aloud about inequalities between minority and majority groups, or between impoverished cultures and western cultures. But what we don’t like to admit is that the inequality we get most hung up on is the inequality that exists between ourselves and those right next to us.

Our coworkers. Our siblings. Our friends. Our neighbors. When one of these people—our peers—pull ahead of us, in some area of life that we care about, this is when the inequality becomes truly unbearable.

But how can we talk about it? It’s not something we’re proud of, after all. A feeling of unhappiness over something good that happens to someone else? We may not have the right name for it, but we know it when we feel it, and we know that it is not a nice way to feel.

It’s called envy, as a matter of fact.

What we need to understand about envy is this: Envy is us finding fault with God's own decision about who gets what. It is rooted in ungratefulness, pride, and self-centeredness. We require more than what God had given; we experience pain because he has given what we want to someone else. We writhe in it. We find ourselves speaking a cutting word, or thinking a cutting thought. Our joy is stolen.

And in the end, only satisfied desire will bring us back to joy. Our desires are for glory—our own glory. And only glory will bring us back. God has promised that a different kind of glory is coming for us, and it is the hope of this glory that will shake us out of the obsession with who, on this earth, gets more than we get:

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (1 Cor. 4:16-18).