Somebody Has It Worse

The same words open every article on this site. This is not medicine. I am not a doctor or a nurse, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing here ever stands in the place of a clinic or a pharmacist. If any of this is you, the useful part of the page is the call I am going to ask for. Make it early.

Now. There is a person you measure against.

You might not have noticed you appointed them, but they exist. Somebody at your work, or in your family, or from church, who is genuinely much worse off than you. And every time your own thing comes up, in your head or out loud, it gets weighed against theirs and comes out at nothing.

And the arithmetic is correct. That is the part that makes it so hard to argue with. Their situation is worse. You are not wrong about the comparison.

But there is a cost that nobody mentions, and it is not the guilt. It is that after enough years of doing that sum, a man stops being able to feel his own situation at all. The reporting instrument gets switched off, and a man with no reporting instrument is in a worse position than a man who complains.

The counting He describes is not comparative

There is a line in Matthew that gets read as a comfort verse, and I want to point at its actual mechanism, which is arithmetic.

But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. (Matthew 10:30, King James Version)

All numbered. Not weighed. Not ranked against anybody else's. Counted, individually, on one person, at a level of detail that has no practical use whatsoever.

That is a description of attention that does not run on comparison. Nobody's hairs are numbered more than anybody else's, and nobody's count goes down because somebody nearby is in worse shape.

You are counted at a level that has never once been affected by what is happening to anybody else. Matthew 10:30 describes attention as individual and complete rather than as a limited supply being shared out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a person out of a line they put themselves at the back of.

That is the actual error in the sum you keep doing. It assumes attention is finite, that there is only so much concern in the world, and that taking any would be taking it off somebody who needs it more.

You have been rationing a thing that has never once been in short supply. The Spirit of God is the one who ends a man's arithmetic without insulting his humility, and it is written that the counting is done down to a detail nobody would bother with if supply were the problem.

What the comparison does to the people around you

Let me say the practical half, because this one lands on other people too.

When a man cancels himself out, his household learns it. His wife learns not to raise it, because raising it produces the comparison and the comparison ends the conversation. His children learn that this is what men do.

And the man who is worse off, the one in your arithmetic, has not asked to be used this way and would be horrified if he knew.

You are not protecting anybody with that sum, and no household has ever once been helped by it. Matthew 10:30 has attention given without a ranking attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what his own habit has taught the people in his kitchen.

And here is the other half, which is harder to hear. The instrument being switched off is a safety problem. A man who cannot feel his own situation cannot report it, and reporting it accurately is the one thing this entire site exists to ask for.

You were given a working account of yourself and it has never once been meant for scrap. The Spirit of God is the one who turns a man's own instrument back on, and what is written counts the small things on one head without reference to any other head.

The plain routing, with no comparison in it

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on this article it is the only assignment.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and there is no comparison to be made first. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And whatever your own thing is goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, described on its own, with nobody else's situation in the sentence.

You are permitted to describe your own situation without a comparison attached to it. Matthew 10:30 gives a picture of attention that is complete on one person and does not pool, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man from the sum to the phone.

Notice the comparison trying to get into the sentence. Almost everybody from this pattern says something like: it is nothing compared to what my brother is dealing with. Leave that out. It is not information and it makes the real information sound smaller.

You have a description to give that has never once required a benchmark. The Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man saying a plain thing about himself for the first time in years, and what is written numbers the hairs on one head, singular, without a league table anywhere in it.