I found that my thoughts the other day were just dwelling on a person.  This person is in the same line of work that I am in.  I know him and respect him.  I actually really value him.  For the good part of a day, I just could not stop thinking about him and his work.  At some point, I realized I was thinking about this person over and over and I began thinking about why I was thinking about the person.  As I thought about it, I began to really examine what my thoughts about the person really were.  I realized there was a lot of critique, second guessing, bitterness, pettiness, and frustration.  But on the other side, I had praise, compliments and happiness that related to this person.  And then it hit me, I was jealous.  I was.  I am.  Jealousy has a way of leading us to obsess about people.  And that obsession often leads to some really unhealthy thoughts.

There are some things that happen when we are jealous of someone.  As we obsess, some version of the following begins to happen…

• We find ways to minimize their achievements.
• We convince ourselves of why we would have done it differently and our way is better.
• We discover reasons not to publicly and personally celebrate the individual.
• We remember character flaws and focus on those.
• We recall the past failures of the person and filter the current situation through those.

This type of attitude and behavior does not cause relationships to thrive.  Instead, jealousy will lead to the relationship tanking.  Join me in my pursuit to weed out jealousy and its fruit.