The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence

Why does it always seem as if the grass is greener on the other side of the fence? I can tell you that this summer, grass anywhere is greener than the grass (or better stated, the weeds and clover) in my yard. However, I don’t believe that the old saying necessarily only applies to my lawn (or lack thereof). It seems to apply to everything in our lives.


As a young boy, I quickly learned the skill of coveting. I wasted a lot of time wishing for things I didn’t have. You can imagine how disappointed I was when I finally became a Christian as an adult and found out it was a sin! Wow, all that work at perfecting my coveting skills, only to find out that it’s actually a behavior that is frowned upon.

I remember one of the first items I really wanted. It was a BMX bike called the “Predator”. I tore an advertisement page out of a magazine that had a picture of this particular bike and stared at it every night before I went to bed. I not only wished for this bike, I also asked, pleaded, and begged for my parents to buy me the bike. Eventually, my parents bent to my wishes and they bought it. Unfortunately, as much as I loved that bike, it never quite lived up to the image I had created in my head. In fact, to my parents’ great disappointment, I often went back to riding my fire engine red, Schwinn Stingray with the banana seat.

As an adult, I thought I grew out of coveting. I have taken great pride in how long I hold onto things as most can be described as “gently used” (although that might be generous). I tend to wear my clothes until they have holes in them (to my wife’s’ dismay) and am slow to invest in even something as small as a new wallet. When it comes to cars, we always buy used and I get great pleasure in bragging about the fact I still drive my wife’s college car (1998 Chevrolet Cavalier) with almost 200,000 miles on it. I take such pride in it that when the air conditioning died I didn’t even have a thought of getting rid of it. After I found out that to repair it would cost me over $1000 (I couldn’t pay that kind of money to fix a car with a blue book value on the entire car of $800), I just kept driving it. Now I’ll admit, I show up to many meetings in the summer covered in sweat, but I just can’t give up on the old girl.

So, I must have dropped my “professional” status and moved beyond the days of coveting, right? Wrong. Just recently, one of my friends described a new shotgun he had purchased at an auction and I immediately wanted one. I went online and started pricing shotguns and found a 12-gauge that I absolutely had to have. It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning and realized that it had been over 10 years since the last time I went hunting and I didn’t really “need” a shotgun that I decided not to make the purchase. So the moral of this story is we all need to guard ourselves against coveting, but I sure would like my grass to come in like my neighbors.