The Lord tells us in the Ten Commandments that we should not covet. In fact, the two last commandments are about not coveting: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife; you shall not covet your neighbor’s house, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17, NKJV)—that’s 20% of the commandments!
It’s not surprising then, that I find myself coveting a large part of the time. Mostly I covet other people’s lives; I could go into details, but really it just boils down to me thinking other people’s lives are better than mine—like somehow I got short-changed in life while everybody else got paid in full. Sound familiar?
It dawned on me though, while I was meditatively rinsing poopy diapers in the toilet (we use cloth diapers on our 9 month old daughter), that maybe my life is less about whatever is going on and more about my attitude toward it. This epiphany came from my pondering the teaching in True Christianity that “the Lord flows into everyone with all his divine love, all his divine wisdom, and all his divine life…and everywhere he is present, he is present with his entire essence,” (364) and further, from Divine Providence, that into each of us there is a constant inflowing of the Lord’s intent, which is “an intent that wants to be accepted by us, to make its dwelling within us, and to give us the happiness of eternal life” (96). So the Lord and the happiness of heaven is present and open to me even as I sit here rinsing a poopy diaper in the toilet? It is my conviction that it is so. This is not a new idea to me, but it’s an idea that my mind finds easy to misplace. It is times like these—with my hands in murky, cold water—that I question the verity and reality of this teaching and turn to the easier practice of coveting others’ lives. The idea persisted in my peripheral mental vision though, and I began to consider that this teaching offers me the possibility that a whole heaven’s worth of happiness and contentment is currently awaiting me if I can only stop coveting others’ lives and instead appreciate my own—if I can only open myself to all the Lord is offering me right here, right now. But how can I possibly get from coveting to not coveting?
It may seem kind of backwards, but I was given the thought to write a list of why I should covet my own life—a list of all the reasons someone might have to covet my life. It seemed like a silly thing to do, but I thought it just might do the trick. I finished rinsing the diapers and tried it. I forced myself to write ten reasons to covet my life—not to make my life seem better than anyone else's: the point is to move away from interpersonal comparison rather than create more of it. Once finished, I felt refreshed, light-hearted even; it helped me to shift my focus from the negative to the positive—I managed to ride the boogie-board of covetousness, so to speak, from the stormy ocean of complaint onto the warm, sandy shores of appreciation.
Coveting is something with which I’m sure everyone struggles, otherwise it wouldn’t comprise such a large portion of the Ten Commandments. It is hard to remember that our state of mind does not depend on, nor is defined by our outward circumstances. Moving our mental dwelling away from the cozy cradle of covetousness takes repeated effort. Making a list of why to covet your own life is just one sneaky way of tricking yourself out of coveting and into appreciation.