Neighborhood Connect

When I was young my church held an annual weekly missions conference. I enjoyed them greatly as we would get to meet and interview many missionaries. I recall hearing awesome jungle stories about rats crawling in personal mosquito nets, being served goat eyeballs at a tribal leadership dinner, and nurses assisting in births on hut dirt floors. Of course, all of these mission events were “foreign” and exciting…right where you would expect, over there!

However, during those conferences we would often hear a call to become a missionary right where we lived. But who could do that given we have such busy lives and the needs of our co-workers, friends, and neighbors seemed so small and relatively easy to fix. Besides, my neighbors can go hear the Gospel in so many area churches.

In light of this, I think of Jesus who according to Luke chapter 10 was asked by an expert in the law, “Who is my neighbor?” To which Jesus responded by telling the story of the “the Good Samaritan”. By the end of the story we’re all reminded that everyone is our neighbor and we must do all we can for them.

After seven years of living in our current neighborhood, my wife and I realize the needs of our neighbors are no different than the needs of those in other countries. What’s really tough is that we have done little to engage them. We are called by God to care for everyone and certainly we should be touching the lives of neighbors who we quite frankly don’t know very well.
Here is the Part 2 video of our Neighbor Connect. Keep an eye out for Part 3 next month but for now take a good reflective look at this video and consider who your neighbor is and how you might engage them as the Good Samaritan.

So about a month ago, knowing that everyone is discouraged by this pandemic, we began an outreach to our neighbors, Part 1 consisted of dropping a bag of Oreo cookies at each doorstep. Everyone loves Oreo’s and they were well received. Then while thinking about what else we could do for them, we thought, “what goes better with Oreo’s and chilly Spring weather than coffee”. 

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