Praying for Our Neighbors
Posted in Daniel Dessinger, people on 03. Nov, 2009
My wife and I have lived in this neighborhood since 2003. Prior to selecting our first home, we had visions of energetically greeting our neighbors and offering them friendship and ministry. I saw us opening our home and inviting the neighborhood over once a week for food, fellowship, and worship.
THEN we moved into the senior citizen mecca of DFW. Somewhere in the ballpark of 85% of our neighbors were retired and completely uninterested in making any move to say hello or welcome to the neighborhood.
That’s no excuse. I should have and could have reached out and been a friend. But I didn’t. In fact, I spent so little time in my neighborhood outside my home that I went months without even waving to a single neighbor.
The point: over the weekend, I heard that my neighbor’s 20 something year old son died of cancer. He was bedridden for months. We only heard about his condition for the first time maybe a month ago. We weren’t involved in our neighbors’ lives and people are dying.
If that weren’t enough, my neighbor on the other side of us lost his wife a couple years ago. I never knew she had died. She had Alzheimer’s and never really left the house. One day he just mentions in passing that his wife died a year before, and I stood there in disbelief. How could I not know the pain and trouble my neighbors were feeling?
Easy. I don’t spend time with them. I don’t know them. I am embarrassed and a little ashamed. The truth is, I didn’t have the faith to pray for healing and actually expect healing for the longest time. I don’t know that my prayers would have done any good. But my concern, my time, and my love would have made a difference. I have failed for too long to reach the people easiest to touch. They are literally next door, yet I know more about people halfway across the country because of their tweets.
Confession: despite all this, I don’t have the greatest desire to know my neighbors. We don’t appear to have many common interests. I’m 32. Most of them are 50-75. I have a young child. Most of them don’t. I’m all about the Web. They’re all about cable tv and fixing up their yards.
It’s not that I can’t find a way to bless them. It’s that I don’t see them as potential close friends. And because of that, it’s more difficult to will myself to step outside my comfort zone and talk to them. But some of them may be very lonely. Some of them don’t get many visitors. I wonder what I could do to bless each one.
