Share the Love!How to Love Your Neighbor_#17

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How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being Weird

How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being Weird

Have you ever thought, “I want to love my neighbor, but I don’t know how”? How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being Weird by Amy Lively is packed with practical, adaptable tips and tools for introverts or extroverts, and people who live in big cities or small villages. If you want to get rid of the guilt about disobeying Christ’s #2 command to love our neighbor but don’t want to alienate or offend your neighbors in the process, this book is for you.

Amy wasn’t always a good neighbor – in fact, she says she wasn’t always even a good believer. In Chapter One she tells her story of running from God for 20 years before natural relationships with godly women changed her spiritual destiny—and this happened outside of church, at coffee shops and playgrounds. Once Amy returned to the Lord, however, it was as if Jesus was locked inside her house! She lived in her neighborhood for seven years before she attempted to get to know her neighbors, and even this was done kicking and screaming. She fought the Lord for a long time before finally inviting 89 neighbors over for coffee. This gathering of women in homes became an international ministry called The Neighborhood Café, and this book was also an outcome of her experience in her own neighborhood.

The Neighborhood Cafe

You may be asking, “Isn’t it ‘loving my neighbor’ when I support world missions or witness to my hairdresser?” Yes, it is… but we have globalized the definition of neighbor to include everyone in the whole wide world, conveniently excluding the people who live right next door—the ones who can reject us. Jesus had a different way of loving His neighbor. He simply sat down with His neighbors at their tables, in their homes, and they did life together.

Loving our neighbor means investing in relationships – it’s sometimes messy, but it’s always meaningful.

If you’re struggling to build relationships with your neighbors based solely on religion, How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being Weird teaches you six other areas where you can interact and engage with your neighbors: family, government, education, business, arts and entertainment, media. Along with religion, these seven areas have shaped every culture in every generation, and they are active forces in your community today. These areas impact the people living around you, and the influence of the Gospel is desperately needed in each area.

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God knew what sociologists and archaeologists have also figured out: your entire community is safer, stronger, wealthier – and even lives longer! – when neighbors know each other’s names and are involved in each other’s lives. And on a spiritual level, loving our neighbors blesses us even more than it does them. You’ll never lean on God more or see Him more clearly than when you obey His #2 command.

Stop Praying for Your Neighbors

Stop Praying for Your Neighbors

Sitting on my big comfy couch looking across my neighbors’ well-manicured lawns, I prayed earnestly for the people living around me.

Stop Praying for Your Neighbor 2

It was obvious they didn’t know Jesus. One neighbor didn’t answer the door when I delivered a welcome basket. Another played with annoying radio-controlled cars at all hours of the night, and cussed at their children. They let their dogs do their business in my yard. They drove too fast. I didn’t like the color they painted their door.

In pious agreement with Jesus’ words in Luke 10:2, I prayed, “The harvest is great—oh, so great! Don’t You see how they are, Lord? But the workers are few; no one is doing anything about it! Oh Lord, please send more workers into Your fields!”

Someone needed work alright – but it wasn’t my neighbors. It was me.

“For years I made assumptions about the people living inside the homes in my neighborhood based on what I saw outside. I assumed they were comfy and cozy based on their tidy lawns and neat hedges. I assumed they were irresponsible and uncaring based on their barking dogs or weedy sidewalks. I assumed they were sacrilegious and unsaved based on the cars in their driveways on Sunday mornings.”
How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being Weird

In spite of my self-righteous assumptions, God answered my prayers for my neighbors… I just wasn’t quite prepared for His response. I found it in the very next verse, Luke 10:3—

Jesus said, “Now, go! I am sending you.”

Ahem? Excuse me? Did you mean… me?

 

Stop Praying for Your Neighbor

“Surely, Lord, You aren’t asking little ol’ me to venture out of my living room into the vast unknown of my neighborhood! Isn’t that what trained evangelists and professional preachers do? That’s not what stay-at-home moms and business owners, nurses and teachers and sales clerks and every day, ordinary people like me do! I just want to meet my neighbors, Lord. Just give me an opportunity to meet them. Make them get a flat tire in front of my house or blow their newspaper into my yard… You can do that, can’t You?”

So then He said,

“Ahem? Excuse me? Did you wake up this morning with breath in your lungs and a heart beating in your chest? Did I choose your home within 100 yards of your neighbor’s door? You’re alive and you live next door, what more would you like me to do? Now, stop praying and go.”

And so I went. I never stopped praying, but I prayed with my boots on. I prayed while I wrote out an invitation for coffee, I prayed while I knocked on their doors, I prayed when I cleaned my house, and I prayed when it was their turn to knock on my door.

And I prayed when they left—but this time, it was a prayer of joyful praise instead of fearful excuses. It was a prayer of thanks for the kind women I met, the friends I made and the security we found in our community.

Only in obedience did I realize
I was the answer to my own prayer.

Why I Refused to Love My Neighbor

Why I Refused to Love My Neighbor

When our daughter outgrew her swing set, we sold it to an acquaintance who struggled to find a truck and some buddies to help haul it away. We weren’t home when his plan came together, so we told him to go ahead and get started. They removed the swings and were dismantling the slide when a woman came out of the house and asked why they stealing her swing set in broad daylight. They were at my neighbor’s house!

It’s a nightmare having a pizza delivered in my neighborhood. With its poorly marked winding streets all named after trees, the poor driver can never find our house—seriously, I use the strobe light app on my smart phone to signal them from the driveway or else they circle aimlessly while my dinner grows cold. There are people who have lived in our neighborhood for over 35 years who still don’t know the street names!

I got lost in my neighborhood, too.

Why I Refused to Love My Neighbor

I wandered aimlessly through my neighborhood, not paying attention to the people living around me. I refused to look up from my busy life and notice what was happening all around me. So when God reminded me of His #2 command to love my neighbor as myself, I was a little surprised. Then I was excited! But then I got scared. And finally, I told God why this was a just a terrible idea.

I patiently explained to the Lord that I was too busy to invest in my neighbor’s lives. I was caring for my husband and our daughter, working from home, volunteering at church and school, going to ministry school—these are all good and necessary things, right?

You know what else? I’m not spiritual enough. I don’t know the answers to life’s toughest questions. I’m a work in progress, an imperfect and implausible witness. Perfect excuse, right?

Besides, my house isn’t ready. I can’t plan Pinterest-worthy parties. You told Martha to back off, didn’t You? You want me to be tied up in religious business like her sister, Mary, right?

It’s risky. You never know who’s lurking behind those blinds. My neighbors don’t seem friendly. I could get hurt.

I had every excuse in the book, and most of them were valid.

I am busy, I am broken, my house is dusty, people are unpredictable. Trouble was, I couldn’t find an exception clause in the second-greatest commandment (trust me, I looked hard)—

“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:37–39

I had every excuse in the book for not loving my neighbor, and a few I’m sure God had never heard before—but I couldn’t find an asterisk or exemption to get me off the hook. After months of arguing with God, I finally knocked on my neighbors’ doors and invited them for coffee at my kitchen table.

At first, it felt awkward. It wasn’t always easy. But now? Since I’ve met Juanita and Linda, Mary Ann and Mary Sharon, Bonnie and Lauren? And my neighbors sat together in my living room last night and talked and laughed and cried and prayed?

 

Oh, yeah—the reward was worth the risk.

A Giveaway for Your Blog!

There are a limited number of giveaways available, so please contact me if you’re interested. I’ll even ship the prize to the winner of your choice! Each giveaway includes:

 

  • 2 MUGS Adorable “Love Your Neighbor” mugs, one for you, one for your neighbor!
  • 10 CARDS to ask your neighbor over for coffee, board games, BBQ – you name it! Invite one neighbor or the whole block, whatever works.
  • 2 COFFEES Single-serve Columbian coffees.
  • 2 COASTERS to put under your steaming mugs.
  • 1 BOOK A signed copy of Amy’s book, How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being Weird.

I wanna do a giveaway!

11 + 15 =

Amy Lively

Amy Lively is a speaker and the author of How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being Weird (Bethany House, May 2015). She provides tips and tools for Christ’s #2 command drawing from her own experience knocking on her neighbors’ doors and leading a women’s neighborhood Bible study called The Neighborhood Cafe. Amy lives in Lancaster, Ohio with her husband, their daughter, a holy dog and an unsaintly cat. Learn more at howtoloveyourneighbor.com.

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