Love your neighbor as yourself…

I think that overall we have a good understanding about loving our neighbors.  Things like blood drives, Habitat for Humanity builds, mission trips to impoverished  areas, Doctors Without Borders, food pantries, and canned food drives have become commonplace not only in the church, but in our neighborhood and community organizations.  We can love our neighbors.  We can hope for the best for their families and children.  We can go to an event or spend a week in mission and then return to our comfortable routines. 
Let’s consider what happens when we love so much we can feel it, when our routines are replaced by the messiness that is loving your neighbor as yourself?  How easily and how often are we doing that?  What does it look like to love someone as I do myself?  This kind of love is hard within the walls of our own homes.  It is you go first love, you take the remote love, and you pick the thermostat temperature love.   As yourself love takes time and energy keeping the ego in check in order to put the needs of others before your own.  As yourself love can be hard to show to those who are easy to love. As yourself love is sacrificial love.  Yet, Jesus keeps gently calling out, love them as yourself, love your spouse, your sibling, your child, your neighbor.  Make sacrifices for them; get into the messiness of life with them.

 So, let us answer this call to love those around us, yes including our neighbors so much that we feel it!

To learn to love a neighbor is a lifetime lesson.  It is not something that is mastered.  The neighbors keep changing.  We keep changing.  Our life circumstances keep changing.  The call to love never changes...

I thought I learned how to love my neighbors during the seven years I was a participant and then a staff member at Mountain T.O.P., a ministry in Tennessee that is truly a “love in action” classroom where the people of the Cumberland Mountains are served by youth and adults in the way of home repair as well as programs for local youth and children.

I made a different discovery when I recently had the opportunity to go home and be present with my parents who are in the middle of the battle that is cancer, one with surgery and the other with chemotherapy.   Going home, I had time to spend with the neighbors I grew up with, neighbors that were stopping over to love and care for my parents, the same neighbors were a part of the “village” that raised me.  Neighbors brought food, weeded flower beds, cleaned the house, tilled the garden, and simply spent time visiting and listening.  Reflecting on this made me realize, I have been learning to love my neighbor my whole life. 

It is easy to love these neighbors.  People I have known my whole life, who also love me.  Our call to love our neighbor as ourselves takes us further down the road to the extra mile.  It urges us to keep climbing higher and love even when it is not easy.  It is hard to love others when you are suffering yourself or when you do not understand someone no matter what the differences are, yet the still small voice will continue to urge us to move in the ways of love even in these circumstances.    It has become clear to me that though it is a good thing to get behind worthy causes and love all God’s people far and near, it is loving the folks whose paths you cross every day in real and tangible ways that make a long and lasting impact. 

Make it Personal

It's nothing personal...." 

Words that are usually not the ones that a person wants to hear.  It makes me wonder, is it really possible to avoid taking things personal? Especially, when nine times out of ten, the statement attached to the disclaimer is usually something about you or that affects you.  I have heard those words in discussions related to the working out of life in a neighborhood in transition.  Things are not like they used to be.  In my eyes it is an exciting difference filled with bright colors and fun new adventures.  Yet, I realize that it is different for me, I chose the neighborhood because I liked the growing diversity and because I have become a part of that transition.  For another, the changing community might symbolize a change of life, or the entrance to the stage of life where it feels like the world is changing around them.  Some may have grown up with certain opinions or ideas that make it difficult to be welcoming of such great changes.  For others it might be a matter of security, of no longer being able to count on things being how they always were and for whatever reason, change is, at this moment in their lives, overwhelming and causing them to feel out of control. 

Whatever your reaction may be, those of us who are living in places that are growing in diversity and ethnicity it is a challenge.  How do we value the roots of this community while also allowing it to grow and flourish in a new way?  How do we challenge life long values that do not account for folks who did not group up with the same custom or dress or speech?  How can we accept those whose opinions differ from our own?  How do we answer these questions as a community of faith? 

As I look at my own journey, I realized my first few steps towards answering these questions internally came when I allowed things to get personal when I met brothers and sisters in Christ while on a mission trip in Central America.  I not only made new acquaintances, I made friends, friends that inspired me to take a look into my own heart and a take a look around my own neighborhood.  There was some discomfort and even fear, but after I came home, I decided to pursue more friends from other places.  The friends I had made helped me to get a glimpse of the God who created all people and I wanted to see more.  I am not saying that seeking to be in relationship with God's people outside of those whom we are most comfortable is the answer, or even the one answer, learning to live together is a complicated and messy task.  I am saying that it is worthwhile, and it will change your life and hopefully your heart and maybe your path.  I do feel confident in saying that stepping closer to someone that has differences from you-no matter what they are and yet is made in the image of God might just help you see more of the God you are striving to serve. 

Lift Them Up

“Lift them up,” that is the statement that was used when I was doing my work with the Department of Children's Services with families in the foster care system.  When I reflect upon the fact that this statement is what drives the work of a state agency, I am amazed.  I am amazed that a system that is not faith based could have such a faith filled statement. Lift them up.  In this season of lent, I think of fasting and the passage in Isaiah about true fasting, ...to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free...to share your bread with the hungry...bring the homeless poor into your house...(Isaiah 58:6,7).  This sounds like lifting people up.    

As a community of faith, how much more should we be faithful to living out our life as the church by carrying out the love of Christ and lifting people up.  The Bridging Ministries Team at Hillcrest, formerly known as Multicultural Ministries, has decided that as a way of growing our ESL ministry, we would like to lift up the children of our ESL students and those living in our surrounding community by providing homework help.  Imagine the challenge it would be to try to assist your child with homework that was taught and explained in another language.  What an opportunity we have to lift them up and bring light to the darkness of feeling helpless to meet your child’s needs! If you are interested in assisting with this new mission, please contact Rocio Martinez or Keri Lopez. 

I pray in this season of lent you would prayerfully consider picking up something new, something that would lift up someone around you, or even better, get into the habit of lifting up and encouraging all those in your path. 

Peace, Keri

Encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing. -I Thessalonians 5:11