Confessions of a Bad Neighbor

For more years than not, I have been a bad neighbor.

When I was a child we moved about once a year, and I could normally feel the relief in the neighborhood when the “For Rent” sign went up. Ours was always the house with the loudest, meanest dogs—the terror of children, pedestrians, and delivery men. In the two years we owned the loudest and meanest of those dogs, we also lived next door to Ms. Betty. She and my mother became fast friends. She had a tiny, fussy little dog herself, who she loved like a son. She never came around to me, and in response I cultivated an air of aloof irritation so that even a decade later, when we were no longer neighbors, we remained locked in a cold war. I remember being a teenager, simultaneously sure of nothing at all and absolutely everything. We sat in my family’s orange and brown living room debating the origins of the people of the Southeastern United States. I don’t remember much of the content, but I remember being sure that I was right; and that Ms. Betty was kind to me in spite of my arrogance. As proof of her patience, let the reader understand that we became Facebook friends after that incident.

In adolescence I was shy, which strangers tended to understand as pride. In hindsight, I can see that is exactly what it was. At the time, I was timid and self-critical. I lived in fear that if a conversation got away from me, I might lose some of my tightly held “self-control.” Our dogs were still mean and loud, and I gladly used this as a shield. The neighbors surely hated us, and so my distance was a kindness to them, actually. If we happened to be outside at the same time, I dropped my gaze or looked the other way. This was very effective since, with a few exceptions, we lived in quiet suburban neighborhoods where we all practiced a studied indifference toward each other.

Perhaps college would have sorted me out, as I am told it does for many, but passing over that opportunity, I went instead directly into life as an employee and renter. There I discovered that many adults were lonelier and in more desperate circumstances than I could have ever imagined. The thought of another six decades of this life filled me with dread, but with no clear alternative, I moved to Richmond, where to my surprise, my life began in earnest.

My first landlord was also my neighbor. He lived in a gorgeous Victorian townhouse at the end of a row of slums. The slum houses also belonged to him. Each one was broken up into small apartments and rented, primarily, to the very young and clueless. Every month I deposited a money order of $600 into his beautiful mailbox next door. For my money, I was allowed to live in a small, remarkably grimy efficiency. The oven didn’t work, and the water pressure was artificially reduced to a piddling drip. Within the first month, I also discovered an infestation of fleas. I should have told the landlord, but instead I saved as much as I could and moved out.

I moved across town to a neighborhood that was just beginning to “turn around.” My apartment was across the street from a beautiful park overlooking the river. I fell in love with the city while walking in that park. My neighbors were also new to the city. They were friendly in a way I could not understand. They invited me to sit on the porch with them and the other neighbors who lived on our block. They offered to fill the empty beds in front of my apartment with flowers. Without asking, they filled our shared porch with plants in beautiful stone pots. I didn’t know how to respond to any of this, so instead I started to avoid them. I stayed inside if I heard them out front. I kept my head down if I did have to leave my house. Eventually I moved again.

Around this time, I had a remarkable encounter with God. I was raised in a Christian household, that is to say, we went to church and we prayed. I had always believed in God and that he loved me, but for the first time I was struck by the notion that God’s love for me meant that I had a responsibility to live differently. In response to this, I changed churches, moved across town, and was once again a bad neighbor. More specifically, a bad roommate.

I was renting a room in an old house, from an old couple, who often hated each other, but especially seemed to hate that their life included renting their spare bedrooms to all of creation. On occasion, their distaste for each other would spill out, and the ensuing fight would fill the common area like toxic gas. This seldom bothered me because I avoided them at all costs, eating at work and coming home only to sleep.

They confronted me one evening. Over the course of an hour, they took turns airing their grievances. Among a host of unreasonable items, a true word stood out, “anti-social.” The other accusations melted away, but this one struck me down. Here I was, living with two people who needed nothing more than to hear what God had done for me and for them, and instead I had neglected the work in front of me.

I moved shortly after that incident. In my next home, I met two women who are faithful friends to this day. I met my husband there as well.

Years later, when my husband and I purchased our home, we met a very good neighbor. I was newly pregnant, and the future was stretching out before us when David knocked on our door.
“The people who live behind you are selling drugs. You need to get a lock for your gate,” he said. Then he told us that his name was David, and his wife was Heaven. He left to go finish mowing his grass. We moved in anyway, trusting the Lord and shielded by our own naivety.

It is fearsome to bring a child into a world marred by sin. I might have known that “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” I had begun to reckon with my own sin and the sin of others. Still, in our bubble of typical church goers, the sin tends to be restricted to what is socially acceptable and almost all legal. The sin that spilled over from our backyard neighbor—addiction, exploitation, violence—was loud and in our face constantly. When the news covers these kinds of issues, the cameras maintain a polite distance from reality, and the responsibility can be shifted according to the reporter’s biases. On our street it looked like strangers walking through the yard where our son played while I was in our house. It looked like stealing David’s lawn mower. It looked like shooting at our neighbor’s door. It looked like sleeping in our shed and telling the police that we were trespassing in their house when we asked them to leave.

When the alleged drug dealer moved out, his landlord gutted the house. We watched from our backyard as couches, mattresses, refrigerators and more piled high in the alley waiting for trash day. The neighbor came back a few weeks later and talked to my husband over our fence. He had a social worker who was going to try to get him back into the house. The landlord came by and told us there was no way. A new family moved in, who are “good neighbors.” That is, they keep to themselves and don’t play loud music. Whatever faults they might have, we can’t see them from our kitchen window.

In spite of the ominous welcome we received to that house, I committed to walking three miles a day in hopes of staying in shape for labor. I did this for months, through the winter, spring, and early summer. In our neighborhood, people sit on their porches and say hello to people passing by. When our baby was born, the people who had been politely “hello-ing” came down off their porches to meet the baby. They asked for his name and reminded me to rest. As the months passed, they remarked on how big he was. They delighted in his growing up.

David and Heaven bought him toys. Once he started to walk, they would call him over to the fence, stooping down to ask him about his trucks. Ms. Bev, one street over, stopped me to give him a pair of shoes that wouldn’t fit her grandchild. Ms. Maria caught us on a walk and forced a box of produce into the basket of our stroller. I came to love our neighborhood on its own terms.

I remember reading Deuteronomy and Leviticus for the first time in that season. I was primed to disregard it by a lifetime of secular education that saw the Old Testament as a record of God’s hatred for humanity. I was stunned to see that, instead, it was full of God’s love and his holiness together, bound up and inseparable.

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God. (Lev. 19:9-10)

“This tree is full of pears and they’re perfectly ripe,” A woman called out to me, filling a basket with her son. The tree is a sidewalk tree, and at the end of the summer the boughs hang low with ripe pears, free for the taking. Down the street, fig trees glitter with emerald Japanese beetles and signs begging neighbors to take and eat. In August I stop by every few days to see when they are ripe. Someone I have never met planted this tree for us to enjoy.

You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another. You shall not swear by my name falsely, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. (Lev 19:11-12)

It is almost a joke in our neighborhood that if you are expecting an expensive package, you should wait at your door, or have it shipped somewhere safer. When we moved here, our car did not lock, so every three months or so, we would come outside in the morning to find the glove box open, all spare change gone, and our belongings strewn about. It was never enough to simply steal, but they seemed to take pleasure in us knowing that someone else had seen what was ours and decided that it should be theirs instead. For a short time, my husband kept a silicone ring in the center console. One night, a would-be thief opened the ring box, felt the silicone in place of gold, discovered his hoped for payday was not to be and abandoned the ring on the passenger side floor mat. It was almost funny to think of the disappointment he must have felt.

You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” (Lev 19:17-18)

[L]et him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins. (James 5:20)

In his commentary on James 5:19-20, John Calvin writes, “And shall hide a multitude of sins. He makes an allusion to a saying of Solomon, rather than a quotation. (Proverbs 10:12.) Solomon says that love covers sins, as hatred proclaims them… There is no better or more excellent way of covering them than when they are wholly abolished before God. And this is done when the sinner is brought by our admonition to the right way: we ought then especially and more carefully to attend to this duty.”

I must confess here that I am often brave when I am alone and a coward face-to-face. The simple way to say this is that I have hated my neighbor. Men and women with smiling faces have confessed grievous sin to me, and I have politely changed the subject. I have seen men and women sinning in the streets, harming themselves and each other, and I have watched them from my window, too afraid to interfere. I have behaved as though the arm of the Lord is too short to save, as though atonement achieved by Christ is not enough to overcome those other sinners’ sin, as if the gospel is so spiritual it doesn’t pertain to the messy matters of being a good neighbor in a sinful world.

In my neighborhood there are thieves, rapists, and murderers. There are prostitutes and men who exploit them. There are drug dealers who profit off of addiction and abuse. And the Lord desires all of them to repent and come to him. There are young people who would never dream of committing a crime but who live confused lives, who succumb to the many legal sins of greed or lust or selfishness or covetousness. And the Lord desires them to repent and come to him. I cannot desire less than that for them myself, so I struggle on, trying to love my neighbors enough to tell them, “Come and see the wonderful works of the Lord.”

Image Credit: Anonymous, “Village by the River” (fourth quarter 19th century, America) via National Gallery of Art. Cropped.