Loving My Neighbor

         Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:18) 

And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:39) 

The verse from Matthew is the verse that follows Jesus’s statement that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is supposed to be very important. I have to say, it’s also hard. I don’t like my neighbors much.  It’s not that I dislike them. I don’t hope something bad happens to them. I don’t wish I could throw up whenever I think of them. My “not liking” people is more like being perfectly comfortable with not having to deal with people, especially if I figure they’re not really likely to want anything to do with me.

The problem is that the things I want to do or learn to do seem to end up with me interacting with other people, to which my reaction tends to be “Yay, things. Oh, people.” But I’ve noticed over the past several years that things I’ve wanted to do have required my interaction with people and with people I would not generally interact with. Sometimes, I have to interact with them because I have to be fair – if I offer something to one person, I have to offer it to the next. Sometimes, it’s that they know how to do something or express an interest in something I know how to do. Other times, I feel the need to invite them to do something that would be good for them or possibly interesting to them. Sometimes, I think God stirs up interests for me because they’ll make me work with other people I don’t like. And sometimes, my interests don’t bring about the interaction. Instead, it’s the interest of a certain little one who provokes me to say, “Oh, My Goodness, Gracious!”

The thing is, Scripture doesn’t tell us we are to like our neighbors. It tells us we are to love them. That means that even though I want desperately to run and hide, I’m taking pictures, trying to notice and compliment people, involve them, help them or do other things for their benefit.

Some time ago, I wrote about telling a store clerk about using a coffee can for a piggy bank and God’s whisper to me about how easy it was to love her that way. A problem that goes along with my not liking people is the fact that I tend to try to make loving people so much bigger and harder than it has to be. Another problem is that I get involved and forget to enjoy it or thank God for the opportunity.