Friday, March 29, 2013

Day Thirty-Four Forty Days of Focus: Relationships

Who is my neighbor? From Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan, we learn that our neighbor is anyone who comes across our path in need of help. It could be the person at work, the grocery store or on vacation in another city. One problem the Church faces is that while we believe we should help and serve others, we are so broad in our definition of others that we end up with a definition very similar to "No one." Someone once said, "If you aim for everything, you'll hit nothing." What if we defined neighbors as the people who lived next to us? At the very least, it would give us a solid target. “What if the solution to our society’s biggest issues has been right under our noses for the past two thousand years? When Jesus was asked to reduce everything in the Bible into one command he said: Love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. What if he meant that we should love our actual neighbors? You know, the people who live right next door. The problem is that we have turned this simple idea into a nice saying. We put it on bumper stickers and T-shirts and go on with our lives without actually putting it into practice. But the fact is, Jesus has given us a practical plan that we can actually put into practice, a plan that has the potential to change the world. The reality is, though, that the majority of Christians don’t even know the names of most of their neighbors.” Jay Pathak, The Art of Neighboring

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