The Neighbor I Have Never Been Able to Like

Twenty six years, and the fence is four feet high, which is the wrong height, because it means you can see each other but you have to decide whether to speak.

She has done everything a decent person does. She took a casserole over when the husband died in two thousand and nine. She has taken in parcels for twenty six years. She has never once said anything about the trash cans, or the tree, or the thing with the drain in twenty fourteen that was genuinely not her fault.

And she does not like her. She has never liked her. Not for one hour of twenty six years.

She is seventy one and she would like to be clear about what this is and is not. It is not hostility. There has never been a word between them. It is not about anything that happened, because nothing happened; there is no incident, which is part of what makes it so unbearable. It is a low, steady, entirely unearned dislike that arrives the moment she sees a particular shade of blue coat through a window, and it has arrived at that coat since nineteen ninety nine.

She has prayed about it. Of course she has. She has prayed about it more than she has prayed about anything else in her life, and she has done that thing where you pray for somebody by name for a month, and she did it for eleven months once, and at the end of eleven months she saw the blue coat and felt exactly what she has always felt.

Nobody knows. Her daughter does not know. She has never said it out loud in her life, because saying it out loud at seventy one, about a woman who has done nothing, would be an admission about herself that she is not able to make.

Love is the first one on the list. Everybody knows love is the first one on the list.

The light gets across her kitchen at about five and lands on the sink and the window over it, and the window over it looks at a fence.

You have your one person. Yours might not be over a fence. And the trouble is not the person, and it never was: it is what you have concluded about yourself out of twenty six years of feeling nothing you would want anybody to see. There is a line in Romans about where love comes from that says something exact about who does the pouring.

Shed abroad in our hearts

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is exactly where somebody normally prescribes. Pray for her every day. Do something kind for her this week. Try to imagine her childhood. I am not going to do that, and here is why: she has already done the praying, for eleven months, honestly, and it did not produce the feeling, and prescribing a twelfth month would tell a woman of seventy one that the problem was that she had not done enough of something she has done more of than anybody.

Paul writes: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us (Romans 5:5).

Shed abroad. It is a pouring word, and it is a lavish one, and the thing being poured is the love of God rather than ours. And the one doing the pouring is named: the Holy Spirit, who, the verse adds, has been given.

You have had something poured into you that you were never asked to generate. That is not me softening the verse; Romans 5:5 makes the love God's, the pouring the Spirit's, and the heart the container, and the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter did not leave a job for the container to do.

And notice how the verse opens. Hope maketh not ashamed. Paul is dealing with shame, and the answer he gives to it is not an instruction, it is a description of something that has already happened inside a person.

And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.Romans 5:5

What twenty six years actually shows

Now the thing she has concluded, because it is the injury and the neighbor is not.

She has concluded that a woman who feels nothing for somebody for twenty six years is a woman without love in her. That is the sentence, and it has never been said out loud, and it has been quietly true in her since about the fifth year.

Look at what twenty six years actually shows. A casserole in two thousand and nine. Twenty six years of parcels. Nothing said about the trash cans, the tree, or the drain. Eleven months of praying by name for somebody she cannot stand, which is a thing almost nobody does.

That is not the record of a woman with no love in her. That is the record of a woman who has been doing love, without the feeling, without any credit, for a quarter of a century, and who has never counted one hour of it because she was waiting for a feeling that would prove it.

You have been loving somebody without the sensation and calling it a failure. 1 John 3:18 says let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth, and it locates love in the deed rather than in the temperature; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has watched twenty six years of parcels.

This is yours right now, at a sink at five in the afternoon: a love that was poured in rather than worked up. Romans 5:5 names the Spirit as the one who pours; the Spirit who inspired that line put the whole supply on His side of the sentence.

Feelings are not the fruit

Let me be exact about the list, because she has been reading it for sixty years and reading it wrong, and so has almost everybody.

Galatians 5:22 says the fruit of the Spirit is love. It does not say the fruit of the Spirit is warm feelings toward difficult people. Love in Scripture is overwhelmingly something done: it is patient, it is kind, it bears, it endures, it does not seek its own. Read 1 Corinthians 13 as a list of behaviors rather than emotions and it changes shape entirely.

A woman who has taken in parcels for twenty six years for somebody she cannot stand has been producing exactly what the chapter describes, and has been disqualifying herself the whole time on a criterion the chapter does not contain.

You were never asked to feel it in order to be doing it. 1 Corinthians 13:4 describes love in verbs and not in temperatures; the Holy Spirit who inspired that chapter made every item on it something a person does rather than something a person feels.

Fruit is not output, and a fence is where it shows. Output would be a friendship, which she does not have and may never have. Fruit is what has grown on a woman who kept crossing a yard with a parcel for twenty six years, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. While the kettle does what it does anyway, tell Him one true thing about the fence with nothing asked for and nothing resolved. Not a plan about the neighbor. One true thing. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that.