With everything that has been going on in the world as of late, it can be easy to be concerned or scared about it! We've had a lot of evil and scary events happen to our world recently and I believe it's truly a display of the sin fallen world that we live in. It's easy to let our thoughts, worries, and concerns be overtaken and consumed by all of these events.
My dad is a pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Hendersonville and last week he shared a message similar to this with the congregation about what we can do in among all of this chaos that really inspired my article for this week.
So before I start, let it be known that I have no idea how to make all of this violence and wickedness stop, but I do know how we can control our own actions and interactions with others.
By being a good neighbor.
In the Bible, there is a parable that is fairly well known about The Good Samaritan. (Luke 10:25-37)
To summarize, Jesus tells the story of a man that was robbed and left to die. Afterwards, three men stumble onto the scene: a priest, a Levite, and a Samaritan, and of the three, the Samaritan was the one that took pity on the man that was robbed and showed him kindness and mercy.
This would have been shocking to Jesus' audience though because Jews and Samaritans normally didn't get along, but that was the whole point that Jesus was trying to get across.
Jesus uses the good samaritan story to show all of us that loving our neighbors doesn't just mean loving our friends, family, or those who live near us. It's more than loving those that are easy to love; It means loving everyone - even our enemies, even those people we've never met, those that have hurt us, and especially those who are in desperate need of help.
In addition to this story, Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. We need to think about others as much as we think about ourselves. When dealing with people, we need to stop and think how we would want to be treated, then treat them that way.
I know that this may not seem like it could help that much, but loved people love people and healed people heal people. Being kind to someone else has more of an effect on someone than we think.
So be a good neighbor so that your actions will encourage others to be a good neighbor as well.
