Psalm 37:1-2

The psalm names a very specific ache, and names it exactly: not grief, not fear, but the slow burn of watching someone who cuts the corners we have kept somehow come out ahead. We know the feeling precisely. Someone bends a rule, skips the honest and costly path, and prospers by it — the colleague who took the credit and got the office, the acquaintance whose easy life seems built on things we would not have been willing to do. And something in us sours. It is not quite anger; it is closer to a slow leak. We start keeping a private ledger of their advantages, checking on them, measuring our own plain and unglamorous life against their apparent winning — and each time we look, a little of our own contentment quietly drains out. That is the strange arithmetic of envy: the wrongdoer barely knows we exist, while we hand them, unasked, a daily share of our peace. The psalm does not scold the feeling. It just widens the frame. Fret not — because they will soon <em>fade like the grass</em>. It is less a threat than a fact of perspective. Grass in that dry climate is dazzling for a week and gone the next, and much of what looks like someone's unfair triumph is exactly that kind of green: real, bright, and rooted in nothing that lasts. Wisdom here is not pretending the unfairness does not sting, and it is certainly not wishing anyone ruin. It is refusing to spend one finite and genuinely good life staring sideways at the life beside ours — grading our own days against a crop that is already, invisibly, beginning to wither.

Elliot draws the envy out at its root. The wrongdoers we are tempted to envy are busy amassing exactly what they cannot keep — grass that is already withering — while the wise trade the perishable for what can never be lost; seen that way, their apparent winning is the last thing worth coveting.