How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others — Edwards on the Self in God
⏱ 13 min read
The thing the comparing soul cannot quite say out loud is that the comparison is not, in the first instance, about the other woman. It is about a question the soul has been carrying that the other woman seems, from outside, to have answered for herself: am I living the life I am meant to be living, and is the One I am living it before pleased with me. The comparison is the soul checking its own life against a stranger’s surface because the soul has not yet learned to check its life against the only Person whose evaluation actually matters. The comparison is, in Edwards’s older reading, a question pointed at the wrong face. The face is not your sister-in-law’s. The face is not the woman on Instagram. The face is His — and the slow undoing of the comparing habit is the slow daily lifting of the eyes back to the only face that has ever been asked the question.
This essay reads two slow passages from Jonathan Edwards — the eighteenth-century New England pastor whose Religious Affections and sermons named, more precisely than any voice in his century, where the soul’s happiness actually lives — and reads them carefully enough that the question of how to stop comparing yourself to others opens into a quieter, more pastoral room than the modern self-comparison-detox can offer. The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s is the daily companion for the season this article describes — for the woman whose comparing has been quiet and steady for years, and who is ready, slowly, to relocate the inner question. For now, read slowly. (If the related ground of why does God not answer the way the other woman’s God seems to is the question underneath, why doesn’t God answer some prayers — Edwards on the affections is the slow companion; if contentment is the wider word for what you are trying to learn, what does the Bible say about contentment — Edwards on the sufficient God walks the same ground from the angle of sufficiency; and if you have been wondering whether the life you are actually in is the one God has been calling you to, how to discern God’s calling — Ignatian discernment is the slow companion for that doubt.)
Jonathan Edwards pastored a small congregation in Northampton, Massachusetts, for twenty-three years. He preached to farmers and farmers’ wives, to widows and tradesmen, to households whose comparisons were not yet mediated by a screen but were, then as now, the chief inner enemy of the soul’s daily peace. He wrote, in his treatises and sermons, more carefully than most about the affections — the deep settled desires and attractions of the heart — because he understood that what the soul desires most is what the soul is. The comparing soul, in Edwards’s reading, is the soul whose deepest affections have been pointed at the wrong object. The slow remedy is not the suppression of the comparison. The slow remedy is the gentle re-pointing of the deepest affection back toward the One it was made for. The comparison is starved. The communion is fed. The slow weeks of the feeding-and-starving become, in time, the slow death of the comparing habit.
This is the part the modern detox programme cannot teach. The detox treats comparison as a behaviour to delete. Edwards treats comparison as an affection that has been mis-directed, and the cure is not deletion but replacement. You do not stop comparing by trying to stop comparing. You stop comparing by being slowly re-occupied with Someone more interesting than the comparison.
The first passage: the practice that places happiness in nearness to Him
“This your practice shows, that you place not your happiness in God, in nearness to him, and communion with him.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly, and notice the verb.
Edwards is making a diagnostic claim about where the soul’s happiness has actually been located — and the diagnostic is not a moral charge. He is reading the practice. He is pointing out that the small daily comparing — the scroll, the glance, the inner question about whether her life is going better than yours — is evidence of where the happiness has been located. The comparing soul, by Edwards’s reading, has been placing her happiness somewhere other than in God, in nearness to him, and communion with him. The practice shows it.
This sounds, at first, like a hard sentence. Read it again, slowly, and notice how gentle Edwards actually is. He is not saying you do not love God. He is not saying your faith is fraudulent. He is saying — with the precision of a pastor who has watched many souls do this — that the placement of the happiness is the inner architecture the comparing soul has not noticed. The happiness has been placed in measuring up. The happiness has been placed in being seen to do well. The happiness has been placed in not falling behind the women whose lives appear, from outside, to be going the way mine was supposed to go. The placement is where the soul has been getting its small daily satisfactions for years, and the comparing is the inevitable consequence of the placement. Move the placement. The comparing will quiet itself.
What does this mean for how to stop comparing yourself to others?
It means the work is not the policing of the eyes. It is the slow daily re-placement of the soul’s happiness back into nearness to Him and communion with Him. The eyes are a symptom. The placement is the structure. You do not fight the symptom. You move the structure. And the moving is done slowly, by daily small acts of preferring His company over the other women’s surfaces — by sitting, in the morning chair, with Him as the first appointment of the day, by speaking honestly into His presence about the things the comparison has been protecting you from feeling, by letting your worth be located somewhere other than your performance against the other woman’s curated week.
Notice that Edwards does not say you must produce more love for God before you can stop comparing. He says the practice shows where the happiness has been placed. The cure follows from the diagnosis, not by the manufacturing of an emotion, but by the slow daily change of practice. The practices that the comparing soul has been running — the scroll, the inner ranking, the small downward looks at your own life — are the architecture of the placement. Change the practice, and the placement begins to shift. Sit, daily, in His company. Let that be the first thing the soul does in the morning. The comparing will not vanish in a week. It will, over months of small daily re-placements, find that its food has been quietly removed, and it will begin to thin.
The second passage: the rest that does not require a great work
“‘The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart; that is, the word of faith which we preach.’ There is no need of doing any great work to come at this rest; the way is plain to it; it is but going to it, it is but sitting down under Christ’s shadow.”
— Jonathan Edwards, Select Sermons
Read it twice. Once for the doctrine, once for the prescription that closes it.
Edwards is doing something quietly enormous in this small passage. He is naming the practical entry-point that the comparing soul has been overlooking for years. There is no need of doing any great work to come at this rest; the way is plain to it; it is but going to it, it is but sitting down under Christ’s shadow.
Notice the verbs. Going. Sitting down. The work is small. The work is plain. The work is not the kind of work the comparing soul has been familiar with. The comparing soul has been used to measuring, managing, performing, improving. Edwards offers a different vocabulary. Going. Sitting down. Under Christ’s shadow. The vocabulary is small and unphotogenic and will not photograph well on the inner feed. But it is, in Edwards’s reading, the entire instruction for how the soul gets out from under the burden of comparison.
Why does this work?
Because the comparing soul has been carrying her happiness on her own back. She has been the one who must measure up. She has been the one who must keep pace with the other women’s lives. She has been the one responsible for producing the inner sense of doing well. Sitting down under Christ’s shadow moves the location of the inner safety. The shadow is His. The shade is His. The cool of the inner room — the place the comparison cannot reach — is not produced by the soul. It is provided by the One whose shadow she has been invited to sit under. The whole comparing economy depends on the soul being out in the noon-day sun of self-measurement. Sit down under the shadow, and the economy collapses. The shade is the cure. The shade is not the soul’s to manufacture. The shade is the soul’s to sit in.
For the modern Christian woman whose comparing has been the small ongoing tax on her inner life for years, Edwards’s second passage is the older tradition’s quiet correction. You have not been failing to compare less. You have been comparing because you have been standing in the noon-day sun, where comparison is what souls do who have nowhere shaded to sit. The shade has been there the whole time. It is but going to it, it is but sitting down. The going is small. The sitting is small. The work is not the great work the comparing self has been performing for years. The work is the un-great work of taking the step into the shade.
(If the related ground of why your prayer-life has not been producing the felt nearness you have been comparing your prayer-life to other women’s prayer-lives against, why doesn’t God answer some prayers — Edwards on the affections is the slow companion; and the sibling article how to forgive someone who hurt you — De Sales on hard forgiveness walks the related inner-room work for souls whose comparison has had a person at the other end of it.)
A note about the journal
If the small daily practice of going-and-sitting-down-under-Christ’s-shadow is the work you want to walk into, the Devotional for Women in Their 40s is built around precisely this kind of going. A short page each evening, a verse chosen for the woman whose forties have brought the comparing into a sharper relief — the friends whose careers have taken off, the cousins whose marriages have not eroded the way yours has, the women on the screen whose lives appear, from outside, to be the answer to a question you have been quietly asking for years. The journal does not pretend you have not been comparing. It receives the comparing and walks you into the shadow. The journal is not the cure for the comparing. He is. The journal is the small daily place the soul keeps going to until the shadow becomes the room she lives in.
The somatic that goes with the comparing
Pause here.
Comparison lives in the body more than the modern Christian usually lets herself notice. There is a particular held quality the comparing body carries — a small tightness across the chest at the moment of seeing the other woman’s life, a quick tensing of the jaw, a forward lean toward the screen that the body did not consciously choose. The body has been registering each small comparison as a small ongoing assessment of safety — am I doing well enough, am I keeping pace, am I going to be alright. The body has been bracing under the assessments for years. The bracing has not been noticed because it has been continuous.
Sit somewhere quiet. Both feet on the floor. Let the hands rest in your lap, palms up. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the chest soften by a fraction — not by trying to relax it, but by ceasing the small ongoing forward-lean the body has been doing toward the screen and toward the other women’s lives. Take a second slow inhale. On the exhale, let the jaw release. Take a third slow inhale, slower than the others. On the exhale, let one phrase rest in the chest: under His shadow. That phrase alone. Not as an instruction. As a location.
Stay with the soft chest and the released jaw for sixty seconds, by a clock if you need to. Then continue reading. The single minute is the practice. The body that has been bracing under daily assessments will not soften under argument. The body softens under shade. Under His shadow is the shade. Sat with daily, the body learns that the shade is a real room — and the comparing, which had been the body’s adaptive response to being out in the noon-day sun for years, slowly stops being the body’s only available posture.
A short word on the modern detox
The reason the modern self-comparison detox, however well-intended, leaves the soul tireder than when it started is that it has located the work in suppression. Stop scrolling. Stop following her. Stop measuring. The instructions are not wrong. They are incomplete. They treat the comparison as a behaviour to subtract, when Edwards has shown that the comparison is an affection that has been mis-placed. Subtract the behaviour without re-placing the affection, and the soul, after a quiet week, finds a different surface to compare itself to. The compare-loop is not the surface. The compare-loop is the inner architecture, and the architecture is where the happiness has been placed.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s is built on the re-placing, not the subtracting. Each evening, a short page, a verse anchored in nearness to Him, a small structure for the affection to be slowly relocated from the women on the screen to the One whose company has been the soul’s actual home all along. The detox you have tried has not been wrong. It has been a behaviour fix for an affection problem. The slower practice the older preachers handed to comparing souls was always the deeper one. Place your happiness in God, in nearness to Him, and communion with Him. The practice is small. The practice is daily. The practice quietly, over months, becomes the soul’s new architecture — and the architecture, not the behaviour, is what finally produces the freedom from comparing the detox has been chasing.
The line worth keeping near the page
If you take only one sentence from Edwards into this week, take the second passage’s closing line. It is but going to it, it is but sitting down under Christ’s shadow. Carry it on a small piece of paper. Put it inside your journal. The instruction is the whole counsel for the comparing soul in a single breath. You do not have to perform a great work. You have to go, and sit down, and let the shadow be the shade. The shade is His. The cool of the inner room is His. The comparing will not be argued out of you. The comparing will be slowly displaced by the more compelling occupancy of the One under whose shadow you have been invited to live. How to stop comparing yourself to others, in Edwards’s old plain reading, is finally this — not the policing of the eyes, but the small daily going-to and sitting-down-under.
Your sister-articles in this contemplative-fathers cluster are how to overcome bitterness — Murray on the root that defiles and how to forgive someone who hurt you — De Sales on hard forgiveness. Read the three together if you can; they were written across different centuries but they are speaking, in their different vocabularies, about the same slow re-placement of the inner architecture from the self’s small measurements to the One whose company is the actual home of the soul.
☕ Get Seven Days of Stillness — free
A free gift from Hayley Louisa Mark. A short devotional companion drawn from the 140-Day series — seven passages, seven contemplative practices, sent to your inbox over the coming week.
No noise. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you wish.
A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotional for Women in Their 40s. Each evening, a short page that lets the day’s comparing be brought without performance, and a verse anchored in nearness to Him — the small daily home for the soul slowly learning how to stop comparing yourself to others by being re-placed, inch by inch, under the shadow of the One whose company has been the actual answer the whole time.
The Everspring Devotional for Women in Their 40s carries Edwards’s slow vocabulary — happiness in nearness to Him, the rest that does not require a great work, the sitting-down under Christ’s shadow — into a daily companion built for the woman whose comparing has been quiet and steady for years, and who is ready, at last, to let the inner architecture be slowly re-placed.
