If you want to love your neighbors like Jesus, it often doesn’t take great acts of kindness or huge sacrifices on your part, but simply being open to seeing what their needs are, and willing to help out when and where you can.
Loving People
I ran across a great statement in Kathy Escobar’s blog post “Dreamers, lovers, and status-quo rockers”:
I’d say that the most defining part of my faith–the center of what I believe–is the love of people & redemptive community. The way I connect with God is through relationship with people.
Even though Kathy’s statement does not describe our “agenda,” it describes our experience. We love people because we are followers of Jesus, but have discovered that in the loving we are connecting with God!
How does this happen? Perhaps some current real-life examples with some of our neighbors will help explain.
Plumber Needed
On the 4th of July, the morning after the block party, our phone rang not long after we got up. Our neighbor, a single woman, told us that her kitchen drains had backed up and her plumber wasn’t available on the holiday. She asked if I could look at the problem.
Half an hour later, I had determined that there was a blockage inside the wall. I needed a plumber’s snake and a plumbing fitting to fix the problem. One neighbor loaned me a snake, and another neighbor found the necessary fitting in his box of plumbing supplies. Three neighbors cooperated to provide tools, supplies, and labor to help a fourth neighbor!
Later that afternoon the woman whose drains now worked phoned us once again to thank us and to tell us about her conversation with her mother, an elderly lady who lives alone, about forty minutes from us. Our neighbor had told her mother about the block party, her neighbors and the cooperation of her neighbors in getting her drains unstopped that morning. Her mother told her that she (the mother) would like to have neighbors like that who she could call if she got in trouble (She has concerns about living alone).
Remodeler Extraordinaire
The following day, another neighbor, with whom we had become better acquainted while talking with him about the block party, saw us walking and invited us to see what he had done with his house. I owned one contracting business and managed another and am not easily impressed with remodels, but I was very impressed with his. He has made an extraordinary number of improvements to his home, many one-of-a-kind modifications. Without a doubt he is a borderline genius.
As we walked through his house, he told us his story, his achievements and some of the difficulties he has faced. He told us his dreams, dreams for his future, including business dreams. When we hear someone’s story we see the hand of God, where God has been working in their life and glimpses of His plan for their future.
Real Life with Real People
These stories may not be the dramatic stuff of famous books or sermons, but are the simple, yet beautiful stories of real life with people we know: our neighbors. They are stories of where we see God, in people we know, in our neighbors, in our neighborhood.
We have discovered that we connect with God when we connect with the people who cross our paths in the course of everyday life.
Do you have stories of experiencing connecting with God when you connected and formed relationships with other people? Share any that you might have in the comment section below!
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Man to many to tell. When God gives you a heart for people it happens to me almost every day.
Hi Sam Riviera,
I like your article! Very inspirational!
We have the same neighborhood and I thought helping those in need is compulsory. I have this belief that if you help, you will be helped to. Thank you so much for sharing this inspiring article. I am now loving to visit your site. Keep on posting.
Since I wrote this over a year ago, I failed to notice these recent comments. Helping our neighbors, be they those who live nearby or those we know from other neighborhoods, can become second nature. We’ve discovered that almost no one cares what we think about politics, religion or much of anything else, but they do know if we care about them. Only then do they hear anything we have to say. Put another way, for most people actions speak much, much louder than words.
Beautiful. People often over-complicate evangelism. Why not start with being a friend?
Exactly! It will make us stand out in the crowd. Everyone is selling something. So few have something to offer, especially the gift of friendship.
Thank you for sharing. I love that you have read another bloggers message and have applied a part of it into your own life and gave it new meaning. “I’d say that the most defining part of my faith–the center of what I believe–is the love of people & redemptive community. The way I connect with God is through relationship with people.” I enjoyed the way that you have, in your own life, experienced the importance of relationships and coming together, just the way God has intended for us to do.
May we live like this every day. We were created for relationship with God and others.
As much as missions overseas are vital to Christian mission we do the world an injustice if we don’t see our neighbor with the same significance.
The need to befriend and witness to our neighbor increases yearly as we become more and more confined to our homes and netflix accounts.
Maybe churches should host some plumbing/do it yourself classes to equip their members to serve their neighborhoods!
How well I remember when no one we knew had televisions or air conditioners. We spent warm summer evenings on each others porches and in each others back yards. We really knew each other. Within a few years everyone had televisions and those warm summer evenings were spent in front of the tube. Who remembers Perry Como, Lawrence Welk and Perry Mason? Soon some of us came to know them better than we knew our neighbors.
Then came air conditioners. If television started the process of keeping us away from our neighbors, air conditioners seemed to complete it. More recently, most of us have acquired computers, devices that enable us to watch movies, be they from half a century ago or the latest release, and numerous other technological marvels that demand our constant attention. Many of us have no clue who lives two doors away, but we have an extensive knowledge of everything that is happening on Facebook, Twitter, and more.
All of this provides an opportunity for those of us who follow Jesus. Let’s get to know our neighbors. Enter the term “Getting to Know Our Neighbors” or “Getting to Know Your Neighbors” in the Search box at the bottom of this page and you will discover an entire series written on that topic. You might also try “Being the Church in Our Community”.