My Neighbour

Do not give false testimony against your neighbor. Do not covet your neighbor’s house. Do not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Exodus 20:16‭-‬17 HCSB https://bible.com/bible/72/exo.20.16-17.HCSB

It has been a long time since the 10 commandments have been given to mankind and in that time Jesus came and simplified all the laws to two: love God with all your heart and soul and love your neighbour as yourself. Note, the neighbour survived all modifications.

If God thinks so highly of my neighbour what can I do for them? We all have immediate neighbours, some are very close and some are distant, as in on farmland. Neighbour, eventually cause us grief, mine does as well. However, again, and again, I remind myself I am grateful for what my neighbours are not: they are not noisy, they do not abuse me and they are as kind as you would want your neighbours to be.

We can easily focus on what our neighbours are not and forget what they are, this time in a positive sense. Focussing on the negative makes us speak badly about people and make excuses for our own resultant bad behaviour.

In our country, we have had a conflict between the left and right of politics. We have had a lot of this conflict in social media. This leads us to bad attitudes towards the opposing party when we are called to love the unlovely.

Again and again, we must ask ourselves: what would Jesus do? Remember the battle is in the mind, keep out the nasties and you make room for love! Amen!