Watering Grass That Isn’t Yours

Has there ever been a season where it’s really easy to look around and feel behind?

Maybe it’s watching TikTok and hearing how everyone makes millions of dollars by promoting random products and sharing links. 

Maybe it’s watching your friends get engaged, married, having babies.

Or maybe it’s wondering how that friend of yours pays her bills and somehow still manages to travel to foreign countries each month.

Whatever it is for you, I get it.

I have very similar conversations daily with my better half about this.  

How hard society makes it to work a traditional 9-5 job and not feel like our life is being stripped from us at a flat rate fee of “not enough.”

We talk about how hard it is to watch people be successful when it feels like it’s happening so much faster for them while we continue to go to school, build our investment accounts, work long days for mediocre pay, and so on.

Yet, amid the complaining the other day, I was convicted.

Convicted in such a way that I looked at Landon, and I said, “The grass is so much greener over there because we’re watering it for them.”

He was like, “What?”

Landon and I had spent so much time this past week wondering why we felt 30 steps behind random social media influencers, wishing we could wake up millionaires (that would be cool). Still, instead of looking at our own world and asking, “What do we need to change to help us get there?” we watered their grass and wondered why our lives looked so boring and dull. 

The simple answer was that we stopped watering our own grass and got distracted looking at the people racing by us.

This life is not a race in which I truly want to compete in.

Trust me, I know this life is a race.

It flies by, and time feels like it’s always winning; however, I don’t want to compete with the people running the race to the left and to the right of me.

Their circumstances are different than mine. Skill sets, too.

Honestly, every single fabrication of their life is different.

Background, history, parents, location, jobs, experience, desires, morals, hopes, dreams, friends… the list could go on…

So, tell me again, why is it fair to look over to the left and wish I was where they were?

It’s not, and the HARSH truth is that I’m the ONLY person it’s not fair to.

I cling to Ecclesiastes 3:11 – “He has made everything beautiful in its own time.”

My timeline is not His. 

My timeline is not all-knowing, not all-powerful, and not always God’s will.

I think, at the end of the day, Satan is really good at being deceptive, and he’s a master thief of joy.

When we look to the left and to the right, forgetting to narrow in on our own lives and the fruit it’s bearing, we often miss the harvest and wonder why everything is dead.

Landon and I were guilty of this this week.

We missed the blessings God has so diligently placed in our lives for the sake of not trusting His plan and timing.

I know we’re not the only ones struggling with this - especially when social media only highlights the good stuff.

I encourage you, friend, to cling to the truth that is Jesus’ heart and intention for our lives.

There’s a song by Elevation Worship that says, “If it’s not good, then He’s not done.”

If you feel like your life is a shadow compared to the people around you, remember, we’re lighthouses, and those spirits of fear and jealousy are not of the Lord.

Check your heart and be encouraged that “If it’s not good, then He’s not done.”

XX, Kaela