On Comparisons

On one of the last days of school before Christmas Break the teachers at my school accepted a challenge from the students to play a game of hockey. I signed up to play with the staff team and took the ice for the challenge. As it turns out, there are some teachers on the staff that are not as good at hockey as I am. But there are also some that are far better than me... and as it turns out most of the student players are better than most of the teachers. Their superior skills led to an 8-1 drubbing that most teachers knew was coming.

But, though the students are much, much better than I am at playing hockey, that doesn't necessarily mean they are all that good. They only appear good at the game because they are being compared to me. "Good" is a comparative term. If, instead, one was to compare the students to Sidney Crosby, they would no longer seem so good. That doesn't change the fact that they are better than me, it just changes the way they are described overall.

In life, we have this propensity for comparing ourselves with other people. It's like we need to find some place where we're better than everyone else. This habit of ours comes out especially when we try to compare ourselves, as Christians, to those who don't adhere to our values. We claim that we are better than they are in various moral aspects. For all I know, maybe we are... but that's not my point.

Even if we are better than others in our morals, that doesn't mean, by any means, that we are good. Just like our comparison between me, my students, and Sidney Crosby, our ultimate level of goodness depends on the standard to whom we are comparing ourselves. The standard, in this case, is Jesus. Compared to Jesus, we're no good at all, no matter how many people we're better than. Whether we're twice as good as someone else, or a thousand times better, Jesus is perfect... infinitely better than us. So really, our comparison to that other person doesn't matter at all.

So what are we to do about this?

Well, in the first example, when compared to Sidney Crosby, the comparison is a little different. I'm sure if you asked Crosby, he wouldn't say that he's a perfect hockey player. Though he's considered one of the best in the NHL, he still practices every day and could name the ways he wants to improve. Together with his coach, he finds a hole in his game and works on fixing that. I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb to say that throughout his career he'll ever feel that he's arrived at the perfect hockey player.

Similarly, in our lives, we have to come to the realization that as long as we're living here on Earth, we won't reach perfection. No matter how much better we might be than someone else, we're far from perfect. Therefore, we should find a place that isn't perfect in our lives and work on that. We won't reach perfection, but we can take the next step toward it... and as long as we're doing that, we'll turn into a better person than we were previously, which is the only comparison we should really be making.