The Portion

Someone who cut corners is winning. The colleague who politicked past you while you did the actual work. The acquaintance who lies as easily as breathing and keeps landing on his feet. The person who wronged you and is, by every visible measure, doing great. You keep your head down and do it right, and you watch them pull ahead, and a quiet question starts up in the back of your mind. What exactly was the point.

At first you just notice it. Then you start keeping a ledger, replaying the unfairness, tallying what they got away with. And slowly something sets in that is not quite a plan for revenge, just a souring. You catch yourself a little glad when they stumble and a little deflated when they do not. You call it being realistic about people. But the unfairness that was out there has quietly started to grow something in here.

This is old. Three thousand years ago a man named Asaph wrote it down. Psalm 73:2-3 (ESV): “But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” Read what almost took him out. Not the wicked’s wealth. His own envy of it. His feet nearly slipped, and the danger was entirely inside him. He hit bottom and told God that keeping his heart clean had been a waste: “All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence” (Psalm 73:13, ESV). The wrong done to you, you can survive. The corrosion it breeds is what nearly kills.

Then the turn, and notice that nothing in his circumstances changes. What changes is where he is standing. Psalm 73:16-17 (ESV): “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end.” He had been reading a half-finished scoreboard as if the game were over. In the sanctuary he sees the end, and the prosperity that looked like the final word turns out to be the middle of the story. That is the fork in every unfair season. The same wound grows one of two things. Romans 5:3-5 (ESV) names the better branch: “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame.” Envy grows the flesh. Endured rightly, the same hardship grows the spirit. The injustice does not get to decide which. You do.

So you do what Asaph did, which is neither of the two easy exits. You do not fake peace, and you do not pick up the gavel and even the score yourself. You take the raw thing into the sanctuary and let the end reframe it. And you land where he landed. Psalm 73:25-26 (ESV): “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you… God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” The cure for envying their portion is discovering your own. You stop needing the scoreboard, because you are holding something they do not have.

So when you watch the one who got away with it, ask which way the wound is growing. Am I asking God to make this right, or rehearsing how I will? Is this making me more like Christ, or more like the beast Asaph confessed he had become? And the quiet one: is the peace I claim really peace, or a root of bitterness growing down where I cannot see it, the kind Hebrews 12:15 (ESV) warns “springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled”?

There is a hard edge here, and the honest piece has to say it. Sometimes it is never made right on earth. Sometimes the wicked really do die at ease, and you go to your grave still wronged. “Their end” was never a promise that you would see the turnaround before yours. Promise an earthly payoff and you have only rebuilt the prosperity gospel with extra steps. The real answer is harder and better. The final accounting is on God’s bench, sometimes only there, and in the waiting he gives you himself, which is the one thing the comfortable wicked never got. Vindication may wait for the end. God does not.

The injustice could not ruin you. Only your envy of it could.