Sour Candy

I hate Candy Land. I believe Candy Land brings out more of the darker side of people than Ouija boards and Grand Theft Auto combined.

For the first couple years out of college, I worked in a local before and after school program in Liberty called Kids Zone. Basically I got paid $10 an hour to play with elementary kids for 25 hours a week. Pretty good job if you didn't mind being broke all the time. I liked the job and was pretty flexible. I'm not a huge gym class fan, but I didn't mind pegging some kids with dodge balls a couple times a week. I learned a lot of different card games from the kids and had a good time playing Spades and talking about life with them. The only thing I hated was Candy Land. Candy Land is just a vile game. For some reason, I believe that God has designed ordained that game to favor children over adults.

I must have played that game 100 times with kindergartners who couldn't tell you the right names of colors. Every time without fail, this is how the game would go. I'd draw a double red. The boy or girl would draw a single green or yellow. I would draw a double blue. The girl or boy would draw Princess Frostine (the village bicycle of Candy Land) and would immediately move his/her piece to the end of the board and inevitably win the game. I would draw the Gumdrop without fail and move back to the beginning.

This happened every time. I kid you not. There would be sometimes when I would be ahead; even within 5 spots of winning the game--and then that cursed gumdrop would come out and I'd go straight back to the bottom again. I felt like the Israelites who were never to reach the Promised Land. Every game ended with an excited boy or girl reaching the end of the game and winning and me cheering them on with a plastic smile and a crushed soul.

Lately, I feel like life is like Candy Land. I feel like I'm stuck on Gumdrop Mountain (or plateau or swamp even) and everybody else is riding high on Princess Frostine's Carnival of Caramel Deliciousness. I can't be mad at them. They just got better cards than me. It's the luck of the draw. Nothing personal, just the business of life.

I think that the biggest thing God has been doing with my heart in the last year has been to walk me through a realization of the power of envy in my life. As far as sins go, envy is a bitch. I know that all the sins are bad, but for some reason, envy seems to be rooted deep, deep down in my life. Through this last year, I've seen how I can begin to connect many of my problems to envy. Tensions in ministry, community, and especially friendships all seem to be coming from this envy that has rooted itself deep down in my flesh.

One spot in life where I see myself glued down to the Gumdrop Outhouse is on the relational front. At this point in my life, my closest friends are all married. Now I have many friends who aren't. Actually, the majority of my friends aren't married. But my closest ones--the ones that I've got a deep loyalty and love for--are. And that's nothing that I can, nor ever should, hold against them. I do find joy in seeing them happy and have learned a lot from them and their marriages.

But, I look at my life and see that I don't have anybody to share the dumb stuff that interests me with. I'm the perpetually odd-numbered wheel. It's not all bad, but loneliness can be a sour candy to eat sometimes.

Heck, look at my dating history (a grand total of 4 months out of 26 years) with two great women who either had severe concussions or later realized that they may have had long, unnoticed gas leaks in their homes. Really, those are the only explanations that make sense to me for how somebody could put up with a miserable bastard like me in a dating relationship.

So when I'm hanging out with my married friends, as much as I love to see them in love, there's a sting there that I can't shake off. There's a bitterness there that I can't spit out. I like to think of envy as this massive parasite that is just sucking the life out of me. It's like this ten pound tick, the size of a terrier that is just riding my back and draining any warmth I may have absorbed from God and just sucking it into this black, cancerous body.

Envy is unattractive and I know that it only brings out the worst in me. I see it bring out the worst in me continuously. It affects the way I love my friends. It affects the way I think about people. It affects me physically. I've been in such a funk lately, that in the month I've probably spent 60-70% of my non-working time either lying in bed or sleeping.

Envy is preventing me from living a God-honoring life that takes advantage of the blessings God has given me. My youth is a blessing and I'm wasting it on jealousy and self-pity.

If envy were a toaster, I'd return it. If it were a gallon of spoiled milk in my fridge, I'd flush it down the sink. If it were a horse, I'd put it down. But it's none of those. Envy is not a physical thing. It's immaterial. It's impossible to corner or catch. Sometimes I can see it, but usually only after the damage is done: either to myself or relationally to my friends. I can't stop this myself. It'll eat me alive without help.

Envy. If I had to put a face to it, I'd give it the face of that big, ol', nasty momma from Aliens. That tall, dark, and ugly queen who just spits acid and disembowels people with her pointy tail. She's this big, nasty beast and I'm just this weak person who cannot fight off Envy alone.

What I need is a miracle. What I need is an intervention. What I need is for God with his giant robot suit of glory and his flamethrower of grace to stand between me and Envy and in a powerful voice that tumbles mountains, command Envy to: "Get away from him, you bitch."

Nothing less than a miracle, nothing less than divine intervention, will save me from my envy.