Our lawn looked like a tropical jungle. Our neighbors hated us to the point of actually threatening us with a lawsuit if we didn’t “take care of our stuff.” But hey we were busy doing church.
Our neighborhood is actually pretty cool. People do things together for 4th of July etc. We never participated. We waved and smiled at them and headed to another town to go to church. I was a part of the newest church evangelism program—we would drive 45 minutes each week to give away free cokes to people we didn’t even know and completely neglected the people that lived next door to us. We lived in our neighborhood for almost five years without knowing anything about our neighbors, without caring or showing love.
This has changed. We now make a conscious effort to be the church—to love our neighborhood and neighbors. Not in a philosophical way only but in an actual way where we focus on our neighbors well being, not first and foremost to “evangelize” them, to sell the Gospel to them, to have them join our Church, but really more from an angle of love. We’re not perfect in this. Our lawn gets a little unruly sometimes, but we are repairing relationships with our neighbors.
We now participate in the life of the community we live in. We hang out more with neighbors doing “over the fence talk.” We feed our neighbors pets when they go on vacation. We are planning this year to go to the local 4th of July celebration. Things have changed. Things keep changing and we’re excited.