New Evangelizers Post: 10 Commandments in the Modern World Pt 10 – Be Happy for Others

I have a new article up at NewEvangelizers.com.  

Commandment 10: Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s goods.

In our last article, we covered coveting your neighbor’s wife. In this one we will talk about our neighbor’s possessions.

It is very natural to want what someone else has. We are beings of desire and even as children we see a new toy or a sweet dessert and we want it for ourselves. There is nothing wrong with seeing your friend’s new iPhone and wishing that you could have one too.

But we fall into sin if we let this negatively affect our behavior and our interior disposition.

When I was a child my older brother and I worshipped Bruce Lee. We watched all of his movies and we acted out all of the fight scene while we watched them on our old VCR. We would even tie our socks together in a knot and pretend they were nunchucks. And then on my brother’s 7th birthday, my cousins got him a plastic replica of the nunchucks Bruce Lee used in Game of Death. And I was so filled with jealous rage that I cried and shouted at the injustice that he should have them and I shouldn’t, even though it was his birthday. To shut me up, my cousins ran to the store and got me a pair as well. As you can imagine, this did not make my brother happy, nor should it have.

This is the key to understanding this commandment: we must learn to be happy for others.

You can read the whole article here.