Love Thy Neighbor...

Remember my musings about commands that seem like common sense but are really hard to keep? "Love your neighbor." Huh. Like I love myself? Yes. Crud. If it were easy for us to do, God would not have spent His breath making it a command.

We have neighbors who are not easy to love. Like, literal neighbors - the ones who live next to us. We know the mom's name and that's about it. They're not disruptive neighbors...they're actually pretty quiet. But interacting with them is like plowing into a cold front. We brought over brownies once and I thought she was going to shut the door in our faces. Friendly greetings are returned with a blank stare that quickly rivets away. Any effort on our part to develop any sort of relationship has fallen flat.

We obviously don't know a whole lot about them...I gather she is a single mom with a couple of older teen boys. I think there was a boyfriend who moved out several months ago. The cops have been at their house a handful of times. The boys' friends walk and stand on our driveway right outside of our house to shout up to the upstairs bedroom. Matt's tried to curb that by running out to the driveway to say, "Are you here to see ME?!" and then follow up with a quick "hey, they have a driveway you can use. Please respect our property." Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Well, a year and a half of being rebuffed and having our driveway be the occasional hangout leads to a certain degree of frustration. I mean, I don't have to have a "can-I-have-a-cup-of-sugar?" relationship with every neighbor (though it would be fun!), but can you at least smile and wave back, say hello, respect our space, or something?

Enter...The Fence. Matt's been talking about getting The Fence for awhile, and I'm not gonna lie: our neighbors were part of the impetus. But a year ago, when we were getting work done on our house, we mentioned to our contractor our idea for The Fence. His reply? "Maybe Jesus doesn't WANT you to put up a fence." Not what you expect to hear from the guy who's blowing insulation into your attic. But it pricked us...

Now, we have other reasons for wanting a The Fence - the same reasons everyone likes having a fence...dogs, kids' safety, privacy, etc. Primarily for the Molly/kid factor. I could go on and on about our options for fence placement, type of fence, etc, but the point is, we had to really examine our hearts regarding our motives for putting up The Fence...especially a fence between us and our neighbors.

Are they a threat to our safety? No. Are they, like, setting our yard on fire? No. Have they given any indication that they mean us any malice? No.

Not seeing a good enough reason to put up a fence yet...

What it comes down to is that we wanted this fence for reasons that were completely selfish and unsubstantiated. We're irritated by our neighbors and want to stake our claim on what's ours, and since the police have been there a handful of times, they must be into "something" and we don't want that spilling over into our lives.

Still not seeing a good enough reason to put up a fence...

Well, you're probably figuring out that we're not going to put up The Fence between our houses after all. We agreed that we would like to fence the backyard, but in such a way that it will run along the other side of the driveway, rather than the side that is next to the neighbors' house. And then we got excited about the idea of knocking out the back wall of our living room, putting in French doors, and a porch outside. But I digress...

I'm not writing about this so you can see how we had this great epiphany and now we're just such good Christians that we're going to invite our neighbors over to sing Kumbayah. No. They'll still scowl at us when we say hi. They'll probably still use our driveway as a launching pad for their social activities. We'll probably still make assumptions about them that are completely unfounded and will have to regularly check our hearts and repent of this. We're still commanded to love them as much - no, more than - we love ourselves, and we'll probably succeed sometimes and fail others.

For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?...And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? (Matthew 5:46-47)

There are enough fences that people erect between themselves. Duane the contractor was right: I don't think Jesus wants us to put up The Fence.

PS - our contractor is amazing and if you want his number...