You’re allowed to be wrong about somebody.

If you’ve been hurt in church, you can walk into another one already looking for the person who’s going to do it again.

Somebody doesn’t speak. Somebody seems a little too sure of himself. Somebody says something you can’t quite place, and you spend the drive home trying to work out what he meant by it. By the time you get home, you’ve decided you know.

He hasn’t heard any of this. You haven’t asked him. But you’re already preparing to keep your distance.

A friend and I were talking this morning about how hard it can be to get past those first impressions. About trying to know people when we’ve already got an idea of what they’re like. About how much our old experiences can get into a new conversation.

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in wanting Christian friends while expecting every attempt to end badly. You want somebody to come over. You want a conversation that goes further than how everybody’s doing. But getting there means letting somebody know you, and you remember what happened the last time you did that.

So you wait for them to make the effort. Sometimes they’re waiting for you.

See, a quiet person can look unfriendly to somebody who’s already expecting rejection. A busy person can look dismissive. And somebody who’s trying to encourage you can say it badly enough that you spend two days getting angrier about a conversation he thought went well.

Any of those impressions can be right. People can be cruel. A friendly voice doesn’t make a person safe, and nobody owes an abusive person another opportunity to hurt them.

But we can also be wrong. We have to leave room for that.

“He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.” Proverbs 18:13.

It’s an uncomfortable verse when you’ve already worked out what somebody meant. You’ve got the answer ready. You’ve had the argument in your head. You’ve explained their motives to your husband or wife. All that’s missing is the conversation with the person you’re talking about.

And once you’ve told the story a few times, changing your mind gets harder. Now you have to admit you read somebody wrong. You have to go back and say he wasn’t doing what you thought he was doing.

That’s worth doing if it gives you the truth about him.

One ordinary conversation can give you information that another week of watching him across the room won’t. Away from whatever he’s trying to get done at church, you get to hear a little more. You learn what occupies him. You find out whether he listens. You see how he treats you when there’s time to talk.

You don’t have to hand him your whole life. Friendship can begin with a small invitation and grow at a pace his conduct earns.

And sometimes you discover there isn’t much there. You don’t click. That’s allowed too. Every acquaintance doesn’t have to become somebody you tell everything to.

But if there is somebody you’ve kept at a distance mainly because you’ve decided what they’re probably like, give yourself a chance to find out. Ask them to have coffee. Keep it ordinary. Listen to the answer without making them defend themselves against somebody else’s behavior.

You can be careful and still make that invitation.

Ask one person you’ve been avoiding to have coffee this week. Choose somebody whose character you don’t yet know, rather than somebody who’s already shown you they’re unsafe.

Knowing what a verse says is one thing. Letting it change how you treat somebody on Sunday takes more work.

That’s the work we do here at Biblical Man. We open the Bible and bring it into the conversations, marriages, friendships, and decisions we actually have to live with.

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