The Little World

We’ve all heard of peer pressure but really that term is more applicable to our last sin…Envy.

What envy generally does, is peer. It peers into catalogs, peers into other people’s mail, peers over the fence, peers over shoulders. It is never happy with what it sees…because what it sees is someone else with something that it does not have.

In a way, the envy that desires some possessions is sort of clean sin. We all desire something sometime, and if we work at it we can sometimes get it. Good may be done in the quest – look at a physician who wants to have lots of money and high position. If he or she studies, thinks, and acts to make people well, they may indeed get what they desire. And many people benefit.  Mind you, if, like Dr, Crippen, the desire goes a bit awry…

Envy, however, can go the other way. Envy someone’s success, whether it be in position or possessions, and then set out to spoilt them for that person, and it is most vile of sins.

You sometimes see this in club work for the Little World – and it often revolves around rules and regulations. I’ve seen people frustrated at the success of others deliberately put forward rule changes that would rob the winner of the prize. As childish as this seems, it sometimes works. It takes a strong club administration to resist the machinations of the envious.

Whether in the Little or Big World, envy is a sin that carries a social dagger – but it carries it by the blade and cuts itself. No envious person is happy – even when their envy succeeds.  They can stab vigorously at others with the handle but they are the ones who bleed.

Envy may peer, but it has no peers.

And that’s it for the sins. You have now been officially warned about the pitfalls – in a future series you’ll be tantalised by the virtues that you may attempt to. They are glued to the other sides of the sins.