My Brother's Shop Is Full

He goes the long way now. Down past the barber and round, which adds about four minutes, and he has been doing it since roughly March and has not admitted to himself that it is a route.

The shop is two streets over. Same trade. Opened fourteen months ago.

He prayed at the opening. Out loud, in front of everybody, with his hand on his brother's shoulder and their mother crying in the doorway, and he meant every syllable of it and would say the same words again today if you put him back there.

And the queue goes out of the door on a Thursday.

His own place is fine. That is the thing he would want said. It is not failing, it is fine, it is exactly what it was three years ago and exactly what it will be in three more, and he has a wall of regulars who have been coming since his father's time and who he genuinely loves.

Fine.

His brother rings him about once two weeks to ask him things. Advice, mostly, about suppliers and about a thing with the lease, and he gives it, properly, everything he knows, and then he puts the phone down and stands in his own back room for a bit.

That is the part he cannot tell anybody. Not the not walking past. The standing in the back room afterwards.

If you have found a longer route to avoid a window, you know that street. And you know the specific shame of it, which is not that you resent him. It is that you love him, you would defend him to anybody, and you still cannot make yourself walk down that road on a Thursday.

The word first, because both of you have it

Let me walk the long way with you and say the plain thing, because you have not said it to your wife and you certainly have not said it to him.

The problem is not the queue. Your shop is fine and you know it is fine. The problem is that the queue has become a measurement, and once a thing becomes a measurement you cannot stop reading it, and you have been reading it every Thursday for a year without walking past it once.

So let me put the word straight, because it is doing damage in its wrong meaning.

Blessed does not mean the queue is out of the door. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is a statement about where God is looking. And crucially, because this is the whole thing: it is not a quantity. There is not a fixed amount of it being distributed down that street.

Your brother is blessed. So are you. Those two sentences do not compete, and the reason you have been walking the long way is that somewhere in the last fourteen months you started believing they do.

Now here is the instruction Paul gives, and it is almost the only practical one in the New Testament about this exact thing.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.Galatians 6:4

Prove there means test, the way you test metal. Test your own work. And then, he says, your gladness will be in the thing itself rather than in a comparison.

That is not a rebuke. It is a piece of engineering advice about where a man's joy is attached.

You have work of your own that can be tested against itself, and Paul's whole instruction is that the testing has nothing to do with the next man. Galatians 6:4 says his own work and then says in himself alone, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named as the one bearing joy as fruit in a person, which means the gladness in that verse is grown rather than manufactured by comparison.

Two shops and one Father

Now the thing that is actually true about that street, and it is worth being exact.

Fourteen months ago you had a shop and your brother did not. Now there are two shops in that family, and the trade your father taught you both is in two places instead of one, and one of them has a queue on a Thursday.

Nothing was taken out of your hands to make that happen. Not one regular of yours is standing in his queue. You know that because you know your regulars by name and you would notice.

That is the arithmetic and it has been available to you the whole time and it has not helped once, and I am not going to pretend arithmetic is the cure, because it is not. Envy is not an accounting error. It is a wound about worth wearing the clothes of a sum.

So let me say the thing under it, since you and I are on the barber's side of the street.

It is not the queue. It is that you have spent your whole working life doing exactly what your father did in exactly the way he did it, and you have been fine for eleven years, and somebody younger came along and did the same trade differently and it went differently. And what stands in your back room afterwards is not envy of him. It is a question about whether fine was ever a decision or just what happened to you.

You have a question about your own life that has been wearing your brother's face, and it was never actually about him. Galatians 6:4 sends a man to his own work rather than to the comparison, and it is the Holy Spirit who searches the deep things and tells a person what is actually going on in them, which is why the back room has been so uncomfortable.

You are favored on this street and so is he, and nothing about the one requires anything about the other. Scripture never once distributes the favor of God as a fixed quantity, and it is His Spirit who is given to each severally as He will, which is a phrase about abundance rather than allocation.

What I am not going to tell you to feel

Now, plainly, because this is the point where a message like this usually goes wrong.

I am not going to tell you to feel glad about the queue. You cannot produce a feeling on command and being told to has been making it worse for a year, because now you have the feeling and also the failure to have the right feeling.

And I am not going to tell you your shop is about to change. I do not know that. Fine may be fine for another eleven years and it may not, and neither of those has anything to do with what God thinks of you.

And I am not going to tell you the envy is fine either, because it is not, and you already know that, and pretending it is harmless would be the one thing that guarantees it stays.

Here is what I will say. Feelings follow actions far more often than actions follow feelings, and the New Testament almost never commands a feeling. It commands things you can do. Bless. Rejoice with. Speak well of.

You have things you can do about this today that do not require you to feel anything first. The written word commands blessing and rejoicing as actions rather than moods, and it is the Holy Spirit who produces the feeling afterwards, in His own order, which has never been the order a man would choose.