Good Neighbors

Here is a devotion for you, from HomeTouch:

James 2:8
You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” 

No one likes bad neighbors. One person complained on an internet site: “My neighbors have three dogs. Chihuahuas. Yippy little things. I’m trying to sleep and all I can hear is YIP, YIP, YIP, YIP, YIP, YIP, YIP.”

Another person wrote: “My neighbor is lovely in nearly every way. He’s friendly, has a cute dog and he brought us fish and chips for lunch on the day we moved in. He watches our house when we’re away, and deals with repair people if we’re at work, since he’s retired. Practically perfect in every way. But, his garden is full of wind chimes. Like, there could well be more than 100. The constant chiming 24/7 makes me crazy. I hear them in my sleep. I hear them at work. I swear they’re following me. The chimes never stop.”

One more example: “My current neighbors are loud and they smoke like chimneys. They have a medium-sized dog that lives outside. He’s called Rocket, and he’s so bored that he barks a lot at small things. Open the back door on their side of the house? He’s off. He won’t stop barking for 15 minutes to an hour. That barking ruins me. They go out shopping on the weekend, and he starts barking. Not irregular ‘I’m excited’ barks; those I can filter out in my head. These are ‘I have nothing better to do’ barks, one every second with a monotonous regularity that does my head in. They constantly leave the poor mutt outside in the cold and he sits and whines all the way into the night until he falls asleep.”

Perhaps you, like me, are amazed that people can be so thoughtless of others around them. That’s why I try to be conscious of how my words and actions affect my neighbors.

Would I want to live next door to a person like me?

What about you? Would you live next door to yourself?

Because the question the apostle James really poses in today’s reading is not, “What do you think of your neighbors?” but “What do your neighbors think of you?”

—Timothy Merrill

Prayer:
O God, a good neighbor is a loving and helping person. Let me love my neighbor always and help whenever and however I can. Amen.

1 Comment


Melissa - September 13th, 2021 at 4:07pm

Thank You!!