The Woman Across the Room

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the first blog post of 2022💕✨. I’m super glad you’re here, and I plan to start writing on here more often. Things got crazy busy towards the end of the semester, and the beginning of Christmas break was full of holiday festivities but ANYWAYS. I’m happy to back because I really am happiest here talking real life- faith, reading, college, grades, good things, hard things, and more.

I hope you had a really great start to your new year! Mine was great! If I’m being totally transparent, though, New Year’s sometimes causes me some anxiety just because of all the pressure that goes into it 😅.

I’m the type of person who is really affected by words, so all the talk about bad habits and good habits can quickly put me down a path of guilt and anxiety if I’m not careful. Don’t get me wrong, I love goal setting, but I believe that talk is cheap and action is priceless 👊.

I don’t like to wait for a new year to start working towards my goals. Honestly, I don’t understand the point of trying to start a goal like morning journaling or morning workouts on January 1st. I don’t know about you, but I actually tend to wake up LATER on the first day of the year because I was up so late the night before ringing in the new year.

That was definitely true this year. January 1 was slightly thrown off because of my late start to the day. Thus, I did not get a workout in. But guess what? January 2 was more normal, and I was able to work out.

Basically, this is just a long and drawn-out way of saying you don’t have to wait for specific milestones to start working towards your goals 📈. Sure, you can get a fresh start at the beginning of a week, month, or year. But you can also choose to get a fresh start every second, minute, and hour.

With that being said, I started a Bible in a Year Plan in the middle of December instead of waiting until January 1st because, hey, there’s no time like the present.

Studying the Bible has definitely been a challenge for me in recent years. It sounds simple, but it really is daunting. I mean, you can’t say diving in and trying to interpret and apply a piece of literature that contains 66 individual books that were written hundreds of years ago is an easy task.

But it’s something I'm working to get better at. Luckily, there are some really great resources out there to help us through it! Oftentimes, I’ll search up a commentary on whatever piece of scripture I’m reading, watch an explanation on YouTube, or read about it in my Moody Bible commentary (which I accidentally left in my dorm room over Christmas break 😢)

I’m going through Genesis right now, and my reading for today was Genesis 29-31. These chapters feature 4 main characters I want to discuss- Jacob, Laban, Rachel, and Leah. The context of the story - aka the backstory of how Jacob got to where he was - is a long one, so I’ll just cut to the chase.

Essentially, Jacob is offered a place to stay by his uncle Laban. Laban has two daughters- Rachel and Leah 👯‍♀️. Jacob ended up falling in love with Rachel and agreed to work for Laban for seven years to gain her hand in marriage- a custom back then.

Can we just take a minute and ponder over the fact that Jacob was willing to work for SEVEN years for Rachel. Like what? It also says that the time passed quickly for Jacob because he loved Rachel so much. Girls, I think we need to raise our standards 😂. I just thought that was a funny side note.

ANYWAYS, after the seven years were up, Laban tricked Jacob. Laban ended up giving Leah, Rachel’s elder sister, to Jacob as a wife instead. Laban reasoned that it was a tradition that the older daughter had to marry before the younger one did. So, Jacob had to stay married to Leah, and if he wanted Rachel, Laban said he would have to work for another seven years. So basically, Jacob gained two wives at the end of 14 years of work. He was an unintentional player, thanks to Laban 🙃.

Jacob liked Rachel more than Leah. Leah knew this and undoubtedly did not enjoy being the lesser of the two sisters. So as a sort of compensation for Leah’s struggle, God enabled Leah to have children and temporarily closed Rachel’s womb.

In a matter of moments, the script flipped.

For a time, Leah felt unloved, unwanted, and unappreciated. And there’s no doubt she envied Rachel for her beauty, charm, and whatever it was that made Jacob love her so much.

The Bible even says that Leah hoped that each child she had with Jacob would be her ticket to love and acceptance from him.

Unfortunately for her, his favor was still with Rachel.

BUT, when Leah was able to have children, and Rachel wasn’t, the Bible tells us that Rachel became jealous of Leah.

If this isn’t the perfect example of the phrase “the grass is always greener on the other side,” I don’t know what is.

While Leah envied her sister, Rachel was doing the exact same thing back.

There’s a quote that I LOVE by Diane Van Furstenbergthat goes like this:

“You know, there’s a thing about the woman across the room. You see the woman across the room, you think, She’s so poised; she’s so together. But she looks at you, and you are the woman across the room for her.”

In thinking about all this tonight, I was taken back to something that happened this past summer at the Texas FFA State Convention. That week was a very high-stress experience for me for various reasons- one of them being the amount of high-caliber individuals I was surrounded by.

When competing in that type of environment, it takes a lot of effort not to give into comparison.

On this particular night, my sister and I had gotten back from a practice, and we were just not feeling our best. After a day of hearing being told we didn’t make the cut for more things than one, we let our emotions get the best of us and returned to the hotel, basically having a pity party.

It was a hard day, and the feeling of being not enough was setting in rather heavy.

Once in our hotel room, Breanna talked about how unqualified she felt. She expressed that everyone seemed more intelligent, well-spoken, and talented than her.

Our friend, who was also rooming with the two of us, listened for a little bit before looking at us and saying, “And how do you think I feel around the two of you?”

That is a sentence I will never forget.

It was a real eye-opener and perspective shifter for the two of us.

Instead of focusing on the talents and blessings the Lord had gifted us, we were hyper-focused on what those around us had that we didn’t. We did not even stop to think about how we might be taking for granted our own blessings. It didn’t cross our mind that we may already have the very thing that someone else is praying for, so we should be thankful.

And so, I am striving to ask myself these things more regularly.

• What am I taking for granted?

• How can I channel jealousy into celebration?

• Why am I wasting time comparing myself to other imperfect people when I could be spending time getting to know my perfect Savior?

And I want to remind you of this as well.

There are many seasons of life, and no one season is the same. You will experience seasons of triumph, loss, growth, regression, fear, joy, and faith. You have climbed so many mountains to arrive at your present destination, yet you still have many to go. But you’re not going the same pace as anyone else. Don’t compare your short breaths when you’re going uphill to someone’s slow, steady breathing when they’re treading level ground. It just doesn’t make sense to compare the two scenarios.

In the same way, you can’t compare your valley moment to someone else’s mountaintop. You don’t know what’s at the end of their peak nor what is at the climax of your summit.

Here’s an excerpt from my Salutatorian speech that encompasses my point:

 You can try all you want to be someone else, but you’ll always be a lesser version of them. God has a unique and detailed story for myself & for each of you that will look completely different from the person sitting next to you. And that’s perfectly okay because God never leads us into less. His plan for our lives is not lacking in any way. & so we should stop operating out of an innate belief that we are somehow always missing the mark, never quite measuring up to our own expectations and to the expectations of those around us. I hope you understand that nothing about your circumstances is an accident. I am a firm believer that God has created each of us intentionally and on purpose- even down to the number of hairs on our heads. I’ll leave you with this regarding comparison. Everyone in this world works based on their time zone. People around you might seem ahead of you, and some might seem behind you. But everyone is running their own race in their own time. Do not envy them, and do not mock them. They are in their time zone, and you are in yours. So relax. You’re not late. You’re not early. You are very much on time. 

And here’s a cute Pinterest quote about timing !!!

Well, that concludes today’s post. I hope you’ll take some time to read Genesis 29-31 for yourself today and reflect on how jealousy and comparison may be robbing your life. You can’t say the Bible isn’t interesting.

Overwhelming? Yes. Boring? No.

Some stories feel like a soap opera sometimes LOL

Okay, sometimes the lineage gets a little boring, but everything else is golden- I promise ;)

Talk to you later.

lots of love !!!!

💖💖💖

- bailee

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