Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Let me consider that question. Where do you live? How do you dress? What is your diet?

Do I like the temperature where you live…or your government? Won’t you be my neighbor? God has called us to love our neighbor. Who is my neighbor? Genesis 1:27 says, “God created human beings in His own image. In the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.” Any person I meet anywhere is my neighbor—each one created in His image. Am I guilty of seeing the differences, or do I see each human in God’s image?

In 1977, I visited India. I felt God’s love for each face I saw. I wanted to be that neighbor, but I had to come home. I was a mother to four young children and a pastor’s wife. The distance did not hinder us from building a church in Bangalore, or from sending a student to Bible school. God took the love I had for India and sent us to Haiti—the very same year. In 1983, we moved to Haiti. We went from living in a 10 room Victorian home in Worcester, Massachusetts, to living in a tent in a field of brush. This month, New Missions is grateful for 37 years of being neighbors with Haiti. My husband Ted has been to India nine times, and he loves to work on providing clean water to the poorest of the poor. I can’t say I love cities with 17 million people, like Kolkata, where the traffic, screaming, continuous horns blaring, and people bumping into each other is much more intense than any Disney adventure. But what I loved best on this trip was meeting a Hindu neighbor, Rajasree, a school teacher who found God, Jesus Christ—not among her 330 million gods—but as her personal Savior.

One of her students in a public school invited Rajasree to see a skit at her church. The skit had a theme based on Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Rajasree did not feel a connection to the skit. Later that year, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, and she thought of the skit. Now, she had a burden. Was there someone she could go to and find rest? She went back to the church and decided to follow Jesus. Now, she had to tell her Hindu parents and risk being an outcast from her family. Miraculously, her parents said that she could follow Jesus. They even allow her to have a Christian prayer meeting in their home. Her mother was healed, and the Hindu woman is now the Christian coordinator of a girl’s home where the girls are loved and nourished, and also learn the “skit” to follow Jesus. The young student in the public school simply invited her teacher to come to church to see a skit. How simple. How ordinary! But a miracle of salvation happened, and now I know Rajasree is my neighbor forever.

In this new year of 2020, I want more than ever to just do some simple, ordinary thing in the natural—to reach someone for Jesus. Is this your desire? As you breathe in the love of God into your life (that you need to survive), can you breathe out His love to your neighbor? ~Jeanne DeTellis Loudon