One warm evening last summer our neighbor called to ask if everything was all right.
Carolyn had just left the house to go to town for a few minutes and had taken a couple of the children with her. Evidently, our neighbors were a bit concerned that Carolyn might have been taking one of the children to the hospital.
When I answered the phone our neighbor said, “Hey Kevin, is everything OK?” I hesitantly said yes. “We can come over and watch the kids for you if you need to go be with Carolyn.”
I said, “No, everything is fine.”
Our neighbor replied, “Well we just got to talking and figured something had to be wrong the way Carolyn took off out of here.”
At that I broke into laughter.
I told them that Carolyn was just trying to get to town before the grocery store closed. We were out of milk and it was on sale and with eight children the savings really add up. Plus things can get ugly around here when we’re out of milk, so it was something like an emergency.
Even though we didn’t need the help it was a great encouragement to know that we had neighbors who cared about us. And that’s the kind of neighbor I want to be. But it will take some effort on my part.
Caring for others is something you may need to work on too. We’ve been speaking about loving God and loving people for the past few weeks in our morning worship service. This is something I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about for the past few months.
What’s challenged me the most is the importance of love for people that’s emphasized by Jesus in Matthew 22. And if we say we love God and yet fail to show even the most basic love for our neighbors we are actually failing in our love for God. What’s your love for your neighbor like? If you truly love God then you won’t be able to keep yourself from loving people.
You can read the text of the Loving God, Loving People sermon series or listen to the sermon audio.