There is a moment in the story of Cain and Abel that I think is easy to rush past. It happens before the field. Before the murder. Before God ever asks Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?”

 

God sees what is happening inside Cain and warns him:

 

                “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

 

That verse became incredibly important to me while writing Where’s Your Brother? because Cain’s story didn’t begin with violence. It began much earlier, with comparison, disappointment, anger, resentment, jealousy, and envy.

 

Something was changing inside Cain long before anyone else could see where it would eventually lead.

 

That’s why the song begins:

 

 

               “Started small, just keepin’ score
                Every win of his left me wantin’ more
                Still smiled when they said his name
                But somethin’ underneath me changed.”

 

I think most of us have kept score at some point.

 

Someone gets the promotion we wanted. Their business succeeds. They buy the house, drive the car, receive the recognition, have the relationship, or seem to be living the life we thought we would have by now.

 

And sometimes, instead of simply being happy for them, something inside us asks:

 

Why them? Why not me?

 

That’s where envy becomes dangerous.

 

Envy rarely walks through the front door and announces itself. Instead, it gives us reasons to justify what we're feeling. Maybe they didn’t deserve it. Maybe they got lucky. Maybe they knew somebody. Maybe their life isn’t really as good as it looks.

 

Before long, we can actually start looking for something wrong with another person just so we can feel better about what is right with them.

 

We see this everywhere. We build successful people up and then seem almost eager to find the reason they shouldn’t be standing so high. Athletes, musicians, business owners, coworkers, friends, even our own family members can become targets of that kind of thinking.

 

And it happens in ordinary life too.

 

The neighbor gets a new car and somebody wonders how they can afford it. A coworker gets promoted and suddenly everyone has a reason they didn’t deserve it. Someone loses weight, starts a business, finds happiness, or succeeds at something, and instead of celebrating them, we start searching for the flaw.

 

That is where the second verse comes from:

 

 

               “Started talkin’ when he wasn’t there
                Dropped a little poison everywhere
                Made his faults a little easier to find
               Just to take the shine off what was mine.”

 

Most of us will never become Cain in the literal sense, but we can still bury people. We can bury their reputation with gossip. We can minimize their accomplishments. We can quietly enjoy seeing them fail. We can stop encouraging them because their success makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes we don't even attack them, we simply stop loving them the way we once did.

 

And that’s where God’s question becomes much bigger to me.

 

                “Where’s your brother?”

 

Maybe that question isn't only about where Abel physically went. Maybe it also asks: What happened to the way you loved him?

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What happened to your ability to celebrate him? What happened to your compassion? What happened inside your heart when his blessing started feeling like your loss?

 

James 3:16 says:

 

                    “For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every                        evil practice.”

 

Envy doesn't only affect the person we're looking at. It changes the person doing the looking, and that realization took this song somewhere deeper for me.

 

I started thinking about Cain and Abel not only as two brothers in Genesis, but almost as two possibilities that can exist inside each of us.

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There is an Abel side, the part capable of giving, loving, encouraging, celebrating another person's blessing, and being grateful for what God has already placed in our hands.

Then there is Cain, the part that compares, keeps score, resents, whispers, judges, and tears down.

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The more we feed that side of ourselves, the more something good inside us starts disappearing.

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In that sense, we can become Cain and Abel at the same time.

 

While Cain is busy burying Abel, we can be doing something similar inside ourselves. We become so consumed with what someone else has that we slowly bury our own gratitude, generosity, compassion, and ability to recognize what God has already given us.

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That may be one of the greatest tragedies of envy: While we're staring at somebody else's blessings, we stop seeing our own.

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Someone else's gift doesn't make ours smaller. Someone else's success doesn't mean we've failed. Someone else's calling doesn't cancel ours, and someone else's blessing was never evidence that God forgot about us.

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That changes the question.

Instead of asking, “Why did they get that?”

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Maybe we should be asking:

“What am I doing with what God gave me?”

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There will always be people who have things we don't have. There will always be someone with more money, greater success, different abilities, better opportunities, or accomplishments we haven't reached.

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Wanting to grow isn't wrong. Wanting to accomplish more isn't wrong either. The question is what we allow to fuel that desire.

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We can look at somebody else's success and allow it to become evidence of everything we think is missing from our own lives. Or we can let it inspire us to discover what we're capable of doing with the gifts God gave us.

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Comparison asks, “Why them?”
Purpose asks, “What can I do with what I've been given?”

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That’s why one of the most important lines in the song comes during the bridge:

 

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              “Cain was never just a story
                He was everything I’d become.”

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Cain is uncomfortable because he is recognizable. Maybe not in the murder. Maybe not in the field. But in the comparison. In the resentment. In the whisper behind someone’s back. In that little disappointment we sometimes feel when somebody else gets the thing we wanted.

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And eventually, God asks:

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             “Where’s your brother?”

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Maybe He still asks us that question.

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Where is the friend you used to celebrate? Where is the family member you started competing with? Where is the coworker whose success became difficult to watch? Where is the relationship that resentment has slowly been poisoning?

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But I think there is another question hiding underneath it:

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Where are you?

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Where is the grateful person you used to be? Where is the part of you that could celebrate someone else's victory without questioning your own worth? Where is the person who recognized all the blessings already sitting in front of them?

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God never asked Cain to become Abel.

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He warned Cain to deal with what was happening inside Cain, and maybe that's where this story becomes ours.

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We don't need somebody else's field. We don't need somebody else's offering. We don't need somebody else's success, calling, gifts, or life.

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We need to become faithful with our own.

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Because if we spend too much of our lives digging holes for other people's blessings, we may eventually discover that the thing we've been burying all along...

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was the best part of ourselves.