I made this my quest in my quiet time this week. I did a word search through the Bible. I found verses where friends and neighbors were together. In the Old Testament, neighbor seemed transactional. Do not defraud or rob your neighbor. Do not have sex with your neighbor’s wife. If you take your neighbor’s cloak, return it. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. (Leviticus 19) Friendship seemed far more closer and intimate. Two are better than one. (Ecclesiastes 4)

In the New Testament, Jesus was a friend of tax collectors and sinners according to them. Them being the religious leaders. (Matthew 11:19) Then in Luke’s account of Jesus’ parable about the lost sheep, “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all gathering to hear Jesus. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” Luke goes on in verse 6, “then he {Jesus} calls his friends and neighbors together and says, ‘rejoice with me, I have found my lost sheep.’” Could it be that we identify everyone as either neighbor, friend, family, or enemy? Maybe never out loud, but always in our subconscious. How then does Jesus’ friends include those we’d call our enemies? How was He able to call friends and neighbors together and that work?

What if getting to know our neighbor transforms into a friendship? What if in caring for our neighbor, he or she chooses to care in return? What if we gained the attention of our enemies by our love? 

I asked Ben and a few others. 

We have as many neighbors as there are people on this planet. Neighboring includes our enemies. Friends we choose and they choose us. Scripture tells us and shows us how to love our neighbor as ourselves and to lay down our lives for our friends. 

Maybe this makes sense to you. You can count the number of good friends on your ten fingers. You can point out your neighbors who live around you. 

Out of this handful of friends and neighbors,

Who doesn’t share your same faith beliefs?

Who doesn’t have the same skin tone as you?

Who has a different story for how they moved into town?

Who doesn’t dress like you? 

Do you choose your friends based on what you obviously have in common? (Socio-economic status, skin color, religious beliefs, season of life)

Do you pride yourself on having diverse neighbors, though you know little about them?

I think the difference between friend and neighbor is us.

If we could look at every person with potential and love like Jesus has looked at us, we just might drop the enemy category and grow our friendship category and the lines go blurry between neighbor and friend. 

We’re going here in the next post and my sisters, Shantinay Bagwell and Desiree Westbrook, want to show you how they have made friends who aren’t like them. Then in the final post of this series on Love Where You Live Day (July 22), we’re going to draw circles and lines because friendship and neighboring are not hindered by a pandemic or a changing world.