Have you ever noticed how sometimes life just isn't fair? It's one of the hard realities we learn early on. No one has to wait for adolescence or old age to find it out. You can learn it in nursery school. Sometimes life just isn't fair.

Little brothers and sisters seem to get such special privileges. The things my little brother and sister got away with! There were times when I really felt like the prodigal son story was some kind of Jungian archetype for familial systems down through the centuries. Well, I didn't exactly put it that way when I was 15, but that's how I felt. It's the way older employees feel when young hot shots come into the workplace and the older ones get shoved out into unemployment lines. It's the way veteran athletes feel when rookies get drafted with multi-million dollar contracts while the veterans have been slugging it out at smaller salaries all these years. Some coaches even treat these rookies differently from the rest, giving them special privileges the way we sometimes do with our children or our employees or our students. Of course there was one coach who never did that. Once in commenting on Vince Lombardi's fairness, one of the Green Bay Packers noted that Lombardi treated every player the same. "He treats us all like dogs," said the player. Some coaches are fair, but many are not in their treatment of players, just as parents are not with children, employers with employees and teachers with students.

Sometimes that's just the way life is, which is in part the point of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard.