The Person Who Lives Near You

"Love your neighbor as yourself." (Leviticus 19:18)

We have quietly turned neighbor into a metaphor. We use it to mean the poor in general, or the world, or people far away who need things, and all of that is real. But that is not what the word means, and it never was. A neighbor is a person who lives near you. Which is much harder. It is easy to love the suffering of a nation you will never visit; it costs nothing but money and a feeling. It is considerably harder to love the man four doors down whose dog barks at five in the morning, or the woman whose politics make your jaw tighten, or the family whose crisis you have watched from behind your blinds for two years without ever knocking.

Those are your neighbors. They are the ones the commandment is actually about. And most of us do not know their names. There are churches that have discovered this and started meeting where people actually live, in a yard, on a street, among the people who are there, and it turns out to preach a sermon no building can preach.

So resist the comfort of the metaphor. The distant need is real, but it can also be a way of never loving anyone in particular. Loving humanity in general is easy precisely because humanity in general never disappoints you at close range. Go learn one name on your own street this week. The commandment was never mainly about the far country. It was about the house next to yours.