(un)healthy Competition

Passage: Genesis 30:1-22

Last weekend I watched This Means War.  It’s a romantic comedy in which two CIA agents who are best friends fall for the same girl.  They use ever-escalating tactics (subterfuge, surveillance, sabotage, etc.) to outbid each other and win her heart.  In the process they destroy their friendship, and reduce the woman in question from a person to a prize.  When she realizes what they’ve been up to, she’s not even interested in them anymore.

Genesis 30 touches on a lifelong competition between two sisters – Rachel and Leah – who are married to the same guy.  The prize they’re after is children.  Leah, the less-loved wife, is nonetheless winning the competition.  But their mutual obsession – with significance, affirmation, and love – destroys everything around them.  Not only do they cease to have anything that resembles love for each other.  But their love for their husband is supplanted by blame and resentment as they succeed and fail in their ambition.  And they create a culture of corrosive competition that plays out for generations in their family. 

When we set up areas of our lives as competitions, we find out that even our wins turn into losses.  Siblings, parents, children and friends get set up as rivals.  What should be love turns to hatred when the people around us become barriers to what we want.  Instead of turning what we’ve been given into paradises of blessing and gratitude, we burn down what we have for a fantasy that never materializes.  What’s the antidote?  To never look so hard to the future that we overlook the good gifts God has given right now.  Every person and every relationship you have right now is a gift.  Don’t sacrifice it for the ever-shifting target of your ambition, or some imagined competition.