Live daily to bless all your neighbors

My niece was born on Labor Day last year, so we are all home this year to celebrate her first birthday. As you can imagine, we are all thrilled and very proud. When my brother or sister-in-love ask her, “Cuantos años tienes?” she smiles and holds up one itty bitty index finger. Needless to say, we are all smitten. There’s nothing like a tiny human in your life to zap the world into perspective. When I think through the lens of what type of world in which she will be growing up and coming of age, my heart sinks a little. Whether or not the world is more violent than when I was a kid—or more or less divisive, we definitely have access to more information about all the violence and divisiveness than previous generations. We have a constant influx of bad news and bad tempers, and it takes effort to find stories of Good Samaritans in the midst of everything.

I’ve worked in three churches in three different regions throughout my career. I’ve lived in neighborhoods and towns that were majority conservative, majority liberal, and somewhere in between. Those experiences make my Facebook feed very eclectic and yet very opinionated. When I think about my one-year-old niece, and the hope I have for the world she will experience, I will admit I’m a bit disheartened about where we are currently. There’s so much aggression behind the opinions that everyone is perfectly entitled to have.

I think that people’s hopes for the future and the world in which our kids will grow up is part of why people from all walks of life and schools of thought fight so hard for what they believe. We all want the next generation to grow up in a “better” world than we did.

When Jesus shared the parable of the Good Samaritan, He knew the audience would understand the subtext of just how divisive and divided those two groups of people were. Yet He shared a story about a person who saw someone who was different—who held deeply entrenched beliefs different than his own—and in spite of that he chose to go to the aid of his neighbor.

I don’t hold any delusions that somehow between now and the next 25 years, the world will magically be a more unified place in which my niece can grow up. I don’t think my Facebook feed and the comment sections on social media posts will develop a an entirely new and different culture of care. But I do hope that in spite of all of that, people will continue to think of the legacies we are leaving for the future generations. I do hope that perspective will allow people—however deeply entrenched their beliefs might be—to strive to be people willing to see our neighbors needs and do what we can to meet them. When I see my niece’s face, I can’t help but hope that her life is filled with Good Samaritans who will see her as their neighbor and treat her as such—especially when we aren’t around to care for her every need. I hope that we pour so much compassion into her, that she sees neighbors everywhere she goes and chooses to treat them accordingly.

I think Jesus’ parable did a beautiful job of shrinking the world into a concise perspective. Every person we come in contact with is a neighbor. Every person on the other side of a social media post is a neighbor. Every person with a yard sign that says something different than ours is a neighbor. Every person with more or less money is a neighbor. I pray that today each of us would allow God to zap our world into perspective—I pray that we’d let the parable of the Good Samaritan shrink our world so we can see each and every neighbor on our various paths. I pray that each of us would be able to do exactly what the Good Teacher instructed and, “Go and do likewise.”