The neighbor behind us was behaving oddly. I hadn’t lived in my home long, but I had lived there long enough to notice that the furtive phone conversations she was having every day on her back porch were unusual. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I did notice that she acted deeply distressed and seemed to be hiding her conversations from someone inside her home.
One day, she finished her phone call and looked up. Seeing me on my porch, she came over to our common fence. She wanted to talk.
Her husband, she said, had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, he had been paying their bills and for several months had forgotten to pay their mortgage. Finally, she received a notice of foreclosure and eviction for non-payment in the mail. That was when she realized her husband had dementia.
Her conversations on the back porch had been with their mortgage company. She had been furtively calling them from there because she didn’t want her husband to hear what she was saying. They had enough money to make up their back payments, she said. But despite her repeated pleas, the lender refused to accept their money. They were in technical default and they would be evicted in just a couple of weeks. There was nothing she could do.
My neighbor looked completely stressed out. And no wonder. In one fell swoop she had discovered she was losing her husband to Alzheimer’s and her home to a mortgage company.
Instantly, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” came to my mind. That thought – no, that command – was an instinctive reflex, like a doctor tapping my knee with his rubber hammer and watching my leg jerk. I had read it, heard it, and thought it again and again for decades. If there was ever a time to apply it, this was it.
But instead of doing anything practical to help, I just said, with a sympathetic look, “I’m so sorry. My wife and I will pray for you.” She thanked me, turned around and walked back into her home. Two weeks later, a moving truck arrived, loaded up their things, and they were gone.
That experience has haunted me ever since. Why didn’t I marshal our neighbors and start a letter-writing campaign, or raise money with them for a legal fund?
Oh, wait a minute. I didn’t know my neighbors. Or at least I didn’t know my neighbors well enough to do that.
Since that experience, Patti and I have worked hard to get to know our neighbors well. Besides praying for them, we’ve looked for opportunities to interact with them, serve them, and share our faith with them. We walk our neighborhood and chat with our neighbors, dog-sit their dogs, celebrate the births of their children, shovel snow off their sidewalks, attend neighborhood events, watch their homes and mow their lawns when they’re gone…all kinds of things.
Last week Patti and I were in Houston attending to family business when I got a phone call from Shirley, a widow on our block. The sprinkler system she recently had installed was malfunctioning. It was going off at 1:30 in the morning and one of the sprinklers was shooting a stream of water straight up into the air. She had been calling the contractor and couldn’t get a response, so she asked me if I could help.
I told her I was in Houston and couldn’t come over, but that I would call the contractor and firmly tell him to get over there. And then I realized that there were at least four men on our block whom I knew well enough that I would feel comfortable calling and asking them to go over to Shirley’s home and help her out. I told Shirley I would be happy to call one of them and send him over.
I hung up the phone. “I’making progress on this loving my neighbor as myself thing,” I thought.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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One thought on “The Day I Failed My Neighbors”
Something similar happened just this past month to us. Elderly neighbors across the road from us that have lived there for 30+ years recently put out a For Sale sign in front of their house. I kept meaning to stop over and see how they were doing, but was always in a hurry to get somewhere it seems. We left for a week on vacation and when we returned they were gone. Their children in another state had come, packed them up and moved them to live next door to them. In talking to another neighbor I found that they were struggling to keep up with the place. Epic fail on my part – I had no idea.