February 25th, 2016 by Zac

We’ve lived in our new neighborhood for a year and a half now. Although we have made some progress in meeting our neighbors and becoming friends, I’m sure we have not reached the standard of loving our neighbors the way that Christ intended.

But one day recently, we had a unique chance to move in that direction. One cool autumn day, our neighbor had started building a retaining wall around part of his property. We don’t know the neighbor that well, but we imagined that he might need some help. So, we offered to lend a hand.

Early Saturday morning, I found my work gloves and walked down our street to his house. My job was moving about 100 stone blocks to where the wall was being built. It was back breaking work!

After a while, Gwyneth and Sam joined me to help. And then Hampton jumped in. By late afternoon, the whole family had joined in the project.

It’s the first time our family has ever worked like that for a little known neighbor. But at the end of the day, we all felt like we had won some kind of battle. We were dirty and dead tired.

Our neighbors comment was, “I’ve never seen kids work like that before”. I couldn’t have been more proud.

Rapport with neighbors is hard to measure tangibly. But we believe that we crossed some kind of invisible barrier that day. A barrier that needs to be crossed much more often between neighbors.