When I was in seminary, Charles Swindoll, a rather well known preacher from the United States, came for a weeklong stay.Wikipedia says of Swindoll: “Charles Rozell (Chuck) Swindoll (born October 18, 1934) is an evangelical Christian pastor, author, educator and radio preacher. He founded Insight for Living, currently headquartered in Plano, Texas, which airs a radio programme of the same name on more than 2,000 stations around the world in 15 languages. He is currently the senior pastor of Stonebriar Community Church, in Frisco, Texas.”When I was in seminary, he preached in chapel every day. He visited various classes and met with students. I sat in on one classroom session, because I loved the way he wrote and spoke. It had a concise and dramatic effect, often with some humour. His illustrations were always spot on and made a person think.One day in class he said, “Resist every temptation to compare.”Out of the context of the other things he said that day, I have remembered that one admonition. What he meant, of course, was that we, all budding pastors, should resist every temptation to compare ourselves to him. There is only one Chuck Swindoll; so, no-one else can be him, do what he has done, write and speak exactly like he does, or enjoy huge audiences, large churches, ample book contracts, and teaching positions at esteemed seminaries just the way he has.Rather, every pastor has his or her own ministry to fulfil. Every Christian person has his or her own ministry to fulfil. God did not save people and leave them here because He couldn’t figure out what else to do with them until they died and went to heaven. Think about it. How ridiculous is the idea that God knows a person so well and has His eye on them so closely in all their life, nurses them along to the point, the exact point in which they are ready to hear Him calling to them and turn towards Him to embrace a relationship through faith, and THEN just to let them sit around collecting dust in a fallen world. That would not be a loving thing to do. If it were all about giving that person, that object of His love, the greatest expression of love, God would take every person who got “saved” out of this wretched place immediately after imparting eternal life to them.I have often pondered that fact. I am here for a purpose. No-one else in the whole world can accomplish my purpose. Chuck Swindoll can’t do it; he would fail miserably, and if he compared himself to me and what God is doing through me, he would feel miserable (and then I could tell him, “Resist every temptation to compare”).The uniqueness of each person extends to every facet of life not just the spiritualised parts. There are no attorneys quite like you. There are no nurses just like you. There are no bartenders, administrators, social workers, teachers, or parents just like you. No one brings what you bring to driving taxi. Nobody has the opportunities you do to be something special to others. In Christianity one says that one might be the only “Jesus” another person ever truly meets. I would say that because of common grace, and because God loves everyone, that people who do not know God can also become instruments of grace in another person’s life.Do you have an opportunity to do good? Are there moments in which you might share beauty with another person? God has created us with two capacities that are more related to just being human than to also being a Christian, and I think they are more important in daily life than people might think. One is our sense of justice, and the other is our sense of beauty.Because of our sense of justice we come to know what is “fair” and what isn’t. We each have an internal standard, and we compare what we see in the world against it. Through our sense of justice we see things happening around us, and we might say, “That isn’t right!” It’s not right to abuse a child. It’s not right for a public official to become wealthy betraying the public trust. It’s not right to be cruel to someone with an intellectual disability. When we see these things happening, we get angry, and the anger is the engine that drives us to do something about what is not right, to make the effort to make right what is not right.Because of our sense of beauty, we take pleasure we see something that stands out as pure, perfectly composed, melodious, or sensually spectacular, and these things contrast with the background of the mundane; they are beautiful to us, and they give us pleasure, precisely because we compare them to the mundane and what gives us the experience of feeling blasé. A lot of people think of God as this cosmic killjoy who is out to make life as boring and miserable as possible by telling everyone what “thou shall not”.However, it is God who made us with the capacity for pleasure, and specifically with the ability to feel pleased by beauty.Yesterday my wife and I sat side-by-side looking at computer-listed houses for sale in one particular city.We found that we have similar “taste” in the outward appearance of a house. Now, this might sound like an inconsequential thing, but to me it said that we have in common some sense of beauty. What pleases her pleases me, and that is the basis for connection, a kind of intimacy.God meant for us to experience pleasure and to also experience that in relationship to others to share our pleasure and to feel pleased by others. This comes through a mutual recognition of beauty, so that in the company of another I can say, “Ooh, look at THAT!”Theologians say that common grace is evident in the fact that God makes His rain to fall (thus providing needed water) on both the just and the unjust. In the same way, God gives to all two needed capacities needed because they are each essential to life and living meaningfully with others our sense of justice and our sense of beauty.There is no reason to compare who I am as a person with any other person, but there is an irresistible need to judge what is fair among people and to engage in intimate appreciations of beauty with another. Both justice and beauty make life worth living.