Well it started last June when out of the blue a portion of the fascia on the NW side of my house just… well it just fell off. My neighbor Greg is a contractor so I called him over to get some advice. He had just returned from a six week vacation and was quite rested so he offered to at no cost reattach the board and touch-up the paint that was damaged in the fall. I asked his thoughts on why it fell… he told me not to worry about it and that he believes that he should treat me as he’d like to be treated. He then proceeded to fix my damage free of charge… Wow! I thought… this was quite a gesture… My wife and I brought him and his wife a fresh baked pecan pie the next day to thank him.
A week later a limb from one of the larger trees in my yard snapped off and put a hole in my roof destroying a good portion of my guest bedroom. Greg heard the ruckus from his house and rushed over to help. He and I over the next day or so were able to clean things up, repair the damage to the guest bedroom and patch the hole in the roof. This was a ton of work and I offered to pay Greg, but he declined my offer saying that he just wanted to be neighborly.
A couple days later I heard a large cracking noise under my master bathroom; about three hours later the tile started to fall off the wall of my shower. Then a week later the ceiling in the living room collapsed and shortly after that the garage door fell off its mount. Greg was there after each of these events offering his help and support. I was grateful for his friendship.
Things like this continued to happen for the following months until last night. My wife and I were sleeping when we were awoken by a large rumble. Fearing the worst we grabbed our kids and headed for the street. About five minutes later, our house collapsed… that’s right… it just collapsed right in front of us.
Fortunately Greg was there to take us in for the night.
The next morning we called a local building inspector who came out to try and figure out what happened. When he got to the house he immediately asked us if we had been aware of the massive subterranean termite problem in our neighborhood that had been causing homes to collapse and trees to fall down. I told him I knew nothing about that. This confused him because he was under the impression that since Greg (who was standing there with me) was the city’s press secretary for all things termite related, that he had told me about the problem.
I turned to Greg a bit stunned and asked him why he didn’t tell me. Turns out Greg had an infestation problem in his house last April and it forced him and his family to take an expensive six week vacation so that his house could be treated. During that treatment he lost some things that were once very valuable to him and it was difficult for him and his family to adjust… He didn’t tell me about the termite problem because he knew that I would have to go through some difficult changes as well and he wanted to spare me from those hardships. Plus, he was afraid that he might appear to be a know-it-all who was trying to inject himself into my life. So instead, he decided to just try and be supportive of me while my house was collapsing… you know… to love on me.
There is a trend in Christianity to re-define love as being accepting of everyone and everything so as not to appear to be judgmental, coercive or close-minded. We’re told to “love the sinner, hate the sin” … then “loving the sinner” is defined as accepting the sinner as-is, not telling them that their sin is destroying them. You know… love your neighbor, but don’t tell him that there are termites destroying his house.
But that’s not love… it’s cowardice.
1 comment:
Very good. I like it a lot. Always great to see what you write. Hope others are reading.
Post a Comment