love your neighbor
Posted on | July 22, 2008 | No Comments
I recently read Randy White’s inspiring and thought-provoking book Journey to the Center of the City. Here are some spin-off thoughts from my reading of the book:
1. Love of neighbor is stimulated by relational involvement.
2. Love of neighbor leads to identifying needs in a neighborhood and identifying pre-existing resources in the neighborhood to meet those needs.
3. Awareness of neighborhood resources leads to treating neighbors as partners in the healing of the neighborhood.
4. We are called not only to be agents of renewal in our fractured and fragmented neighborhoods, but also called to respond to the work God would do through our neighborhood in us.
5. True love of neighbor lives in close proximity with need, willing to embrace the awkwardness and inconveniences of serving others.
6. The greatest security risk in the multi-faceted dangers of our neighborhoods is the fear that keeps a person from risking love of neighbor.
Another great book I started reading then lost is Robert Lupton’s Compassion, Justice, and the Christian Life. In it, he asks long overdue questions about charitable efforts, human dignity, and love of neighbor in urban America.
I wish living this stuff out would look as cute and concise as the above points. Like what do you do when you come downstairs in the morning to find your homeless (and unbearably impossible and hopeless) friend sacked out on the couch because you forgot to lock the front door?
??
Tags: community development > homelessness > love > neighbor > poverty > urban renewal