“God told me it was time to come out of the hole. But I don’t
know if I have the energy.”
I love that line.
It comes from an old Boston Globe story about Thomas
Johnson, an eccentric hermit. For ten years he avoided society by wandering
deep into a Boy Scout campground on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts and
burrowing eight feet underground.
Then a deer hunter stumbled over his stovepipe jutting out
of the ground, and soon federal agents and state health officials were
demanding he abandon his unauthorized hideaway.
He surrendered to the inevitable. “God told me it was time
to come out of the hole,” he told the Boston Globe with a shrug, adding, “but I
don’t know if I have the energy.”
Like Thomas Johnson, believers are tempted to burrow down
into bunkers in escape from the world around us. But when Jesus was asked to
identify the most important commandment, he answered with two: Love God and
love your neighbor.
It’s impossible to love your neighbor from the comfort of
your hermit hole. That’s why I challenged you six
weeks ago to simply discover the names of 8 of your closest neighbors. The
deadline for that challenge is this Sunday, October 11.
Some of us can identify with Johnson. Though he knew what he
had to do he admitted, “I don’t know if I have the energy.” That’s where prayer
and dependence on the Holy Spirit comes in. Take a step in the direction of a
neighbor today: Once you start you’ll find God supplying what you need to
finish.
This Sunday is the end and the beginning of our neighboring
project. It is the end of the
six-week challenge to simply discover the names of 8 of your closest neighbors.
But it’s also the beginning of
actually building relationships. Some of those relationships will remain
superficial, but some will go deep. And some may even impact eternity. I’ll
tell you more about the “next step” in good neighboring this Sunday in our 10
a.m. service!
Keep on Prayerwalking.
We had a great experience at our first prayerwalk through the neighborhoods
immediately around our church building! We’ll schedule another churchwide
effort in the future, but you don’t have to wait. Write Lisa (lisa@hillcrest.church)
and she will send you a map with a one-mile assignment. Return that map with
your name and the date you walked it.
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and it will arrive in your inbox each Wednesday
hillcrest.church/newsletters
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