Love your neighbor

This is kind of embarrassing (and potentially longer than Rudi's one way street letter), but I want to share it because I think it represents some bigger things happening inside of me.

First, some background: We've lived in the same house for almost 9 years. One of neighbors is an older man who is very meticulous with his home and landscaping. I am not quite as diligent. For the first bunch of years, we got along great. Over the course of time, I think a lot of little things built up that I was doing and was unaware of (I've been told I can be oblivious at times) that created some tension.

One example: Our mail lady will not deliver our mail if the mailbox is blocked by a car. For whatever reason, lots of people like to park in front of mailbox. My neighbors mailbox happened to be attached to my ours, and he wouldn't get mail either. I came home one day and found his mailbox cut off and moved to the other side of my drive way. Little things like this built up until one day after sealing my driveway, I took a piece of masking tape and stretched it from my mailbox to my neighbors to prevent people from driving on it. I looked out the window later and saw my neighbor run out and angrily tear the tape off of his mailbox. For some dumb reason, I got angry as well and went out to put it back on. This ended with him and I yelling at each other. Stupid, right? Great example of loving my neighbor, right? Yeah. Right.

On side note, my neighbors mailbox just happened to be in a spot that would be very easy to hit when one backed out of my driveway. One day when the DHL delivery guy was over, he backed out of my driveway and crushed my neighbors mailbox. Probably didn't help things.

Anyways, the bad feelings built from there, I think. It got to the point that neither of us would look at each other when the other was outside, and just kind of an ugly tension. Most of the time, I felt certain self-righteous anger inside of me, but there was another part of me that I knew I was being an ass. I would hear Jesus' words Love your neighbor and I would think to myself that I didn't even love my next door neighbor, let alone neighbors the way Jesus describes. Even recently, I would read in 1 John asking how we can say we love God who we can see, when we can't even love the people around us we can see. I got to a point where I wanted to fix things, but didn't know how. I talked to Cathie about maybe going over and just apologizing for being such an ass, but never did.

So today, I was outside shoveling our driveway and sidewalks. If you have a house, you know that there's a weird deal in terms of shoveling sidewalks and how far to shovel. Normally, I wouldn't of touched his sidewalk. Today, I shoveled the whole thing for him. As I was finishing my driveway, he came home, got out his snow blower and came over to my driveway and cleared out a huge portion that was covered from the snow plow without saying a thing. Afterwards, I waved and said Thank You. Sounds small, but it was a big deal towards loving my neighbor and making things right.

You're probably thinking that for me to say all of that just to say that I shoveled someones sidewalk seems sillier than trying to write a letter that claims paternity of every child on your block just to get a one-way street. To me, it's a bigger thing about what's happening in my heart. There's a bigger change going on side of me that I'll share at some point. God is doing phenomenal things to who I am and this is just a small outward sign of a bigger transformation.