A neighbor is just a random person who lives near you, someone who gets their mail at about the same time you do. It’s the most arbitrary connection in the world. And yet Jesus put “love your neighbor as yourself” at the heart of his description of religious life. The person we are called to love is anyone we come in contact with whether we have reason to like them or not.
Who have you treated with love recently, simply because they were there?
“What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.”
― Don DeLillo
Who are you reluctant to contact or acknowledge? How might they be an agent of your salvation?
There’s nothing quite like the sinking feeling of realizing that the train is leaving the station just as you have arrived, that you have missed what you wanted by mere seconds. In that moment it’s natural to kick yourself for all the ways that you could have done something different to get there just a bit sooner. However, you could just as well turn toward someone near you on the platform and commiserate with them, gaining company as you wait.
How have you recently turned around an unpleasant situation?
As train tracks stretch into the distance they appear to converge. We know the two sides of a track are always at an even distance, but our eyes tell us that the farther they are away, the closer they are together. Even what we “know” from the evidence of our own eyes isn’t necessarily true. Perhaps what we “know” about other people—that they are unkind or selfish or unfair— might be as much a function of our perception as their reality.
How might you see someone who bothers you in a different light?
Dr. King said that we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” and many of us identify with the Interdependent Web as an image of the complex web of relationships which encompasses all beings. But many of our relationships depend on the tangible web of wires which make possible our connections via phone and internet. And these wires only continue to connect us if they are tended and maintained.
What will you do today to tend to some connection that matters to you?
