Proverbs 25:17
Don’t set foot too frequently in your neighbor’s house,
lest he become weary of you and hate you.
We all think it would be awesome. You know you wanted to do it too. When you watched Friends, you thought how cool it would be to have great friends who live right across the hall and always came over to hang out. The kind where you didn’t have to knock, you could just walk in, plop down on the couch and just hang out.
The truth is, we all think we’d want it, but the reality is it wouldn’t take long for that to become a problem. You’d find yourself sharing parts of your life that you never wanted to share. You’d inevitably find yourself in situations where you couldn’t do something you really wanted to do because someone might walk in. And no, that’s not what I was talking about. I was talking about dancing to Taylor Swift.
This can be a temptation for us though. And it’s something we need to be cautious of. However, I don’t think we’re really every going to be in danger of what this proverb warns.
We live in a very different time. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that this proverb is talking about a daily, several time a day kind of a thing. We wouldn’t really do that. The chances of us going to our neighbor’s house two days in a row aren’t real high, let alone many times in one day.
Perhaps this proverb should serve as something we ought to aim for. Maybe we need to try to get close enough to someone that we get close to the point of them wanting us to leave because we come over too often. Maybe it’s such a foreign concept for us that what we really need isn’t motivation to stay away from people. What we really need is permission to try to get close enough that we might be in danger of having this happen. This was a warning for that time. Maybe it’s a goal for us.
Don’t worry, I won’t be stopping by unannounced any time soon.
