Questioning Cultural Norms

Proverbs 18:24 (KJV) A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.

As I read this this morning in the NASB, I found myself realizing that it is contrary to much popular advice.  I watched some Clickbait recently talking about the five things that caused men to die early.  It was interesting but had a lot of nonsense involved.  I have a suspicion it was generated by AI.  One of their points was that isolation is a major cause of early death in men.  In the course of the discussion they talked about how when you’re younger you have many friends but then when you get older, you might just be down to two involvements.

A note was the two involvement they chose.  First was family and second was yourself.  In some families, I could see how a person in that situation might be very isolated.  In some families, there is no contact, no bonding, in a word no love.  Most of the families I know are interacting enough that no one person would consider himself isolated.  As for the second thing, counting yourself as an involvement is rather strange.  I noted that they left out the church.  They obviously had no sense of contact with God himself.  It was rather a short list.

But my point is that what Proverbs is saying here is there’s a real danger in having too many friends.  That’s counterintuitive in our culture.  We are told we need to get out and relate to people.  I’ve always wondered when popular figures talk about how this person was their good friend and then a few paragraphs later, they’ll talk about someone else who was their good friend.  When you read through everything they have to say it seems like they have more really good friends than it’s possible to spend time with.

So?  Don’t feel like you have to keep up with your friendly local counselors advice about finding new friends.  If you have a few good friends that will probably take up all the extra energy you have.  If you have family, they qualify.  Build your standards on what the Bible says not on psychology advocates.