Who is your neighbor?

Up until the popular advent of television, neighborhoods were much more social.  People visited each other on their front porches, stopped in for a visit at random times. Before the age of in-home entertainment, forms of entertainment were found in other people: story telling, jokes and the like.

Now the traditional ways of being a neighbor have been challenged, usually by marketing or our fear of crime.  Now we may greet the door bell ringing with a bit of suspicion.  In this age of telemarketing, the home phone ringing is greeted as an assault (Who is it?  check the caller ID!).  Worse yet is when a telemarketer calls your cell phone, which is the ultimate offense.

Don't mistake me: some of these fears can be justified considering the changes in our culture.  They are responses to the environments we have been placed.

Americans in this day and age are a bit more guarded toward who we let into our inner circle, into who we let be our "neighbor".  Right or wrong, we may have become insulated towards the people who may indeed be our neighbors. Very few of us know are immediate neighbors in our own neighborhoods, and perhaps some of those neighbors want to be left alone!

I have friends that, when I email or text them, will immediately call me instead.  I like this idea.  They don't hate email necessarily, they just see the value of having human interaction, and they aren't afraid to be a bit counter-cultural by replying with a *gasp* phone call.

The irony is that we are made for relationship: with God and with other people.  We are created to know and be known.  So while we may push away human contact more than we used to, we crave it more than ever.  Online social networking, Ustream video casting, email, text messaging - all are not actual human interaction but they still scream the same timeless message "I am here!  Notice me!"  Facebook is a valid, quite revolutionary form of communication, but when it supplants actual people then we have entered into a dangerous place where we rule over as kings or queens over an empty kingdom, where everything is filtered to suit our own tastes.

This is the paradox of the postmodern mind: we crave relationship, but we tend to push it away.  We crave God, but we don't want to find God in church (with other people).  We crave neighbors, but only at a safe distance.  We're afraid of being open and vulnerable. I realize I'm speaking in generalities (which thus aren't completely true) but many can relate.

In Mark 12:30-31, Jesus states that you can summarize the 10 Commandments down into two: love God (firstly), and then love your neighbor as yourself. These two ideas are intrinsically connected.  Do you say you love God?  Then you must be willing to break our of your electronic shell and engage in life with other people and love them as yourself.  If Jesus decides to amend the 10 Commandments, it's worth listening to, as these two ideas are the absolute cornerstone to living a godly and meaningful existence.

These two statements of love God and love your neighbor are a foretaste of the new world to come.  The Bible is clear that one day the entire earth will be redeemed, and God will literally dwell with his people (those who are in Christ), on earth, for quite some time.  This certainly sounds like "heaven" to me.  And in that place, we will love God and love each other in the most perfect sense of the word.

Let us get started now.  Today.  You and me.

I'll call you about it.

Clark