The Flock on Your Block

Privacy has become a very public issue. We protect it however we can. Tinted glass on our cars. Security codes on our cell phones and computers. High fences around our lawns. Blinds on our windows—tightly pulled down.

It's easy to keep others from seeing what really goes on inside. Easy, but dangerous.

Last December my wife Candy and I decided to host a neighborhood Christmas open house. We invited the people who live on our block to come over for refreshments on a Sunday afternoon. It turned out well. An older couple who have lived in the neighborhood longer than anyone else came and stayed for three hours, chatting and nibbling crackers and cheese.

One of the most significant parts of our little outreach effort, though, involved someone who wasn't able to come to the party. A week before, Candy stopped at the home of a neighbor to invite her to our open house. The woman lives alone, with no one to keep her company except three cats. When she answered the doorbell it was immediately obvious to Candy that she wasn't well. She had stumbled over one of her cats and fallen down a flight of stairs. Flustered and bruised, she had been unable to get out of her house for days. Candy offered to buy her some groceries, and the woman received her offer gladly. We had no idea our neighbor had been suffering alone just a short walk from our home.

What lies behind the blinds of the houses in your neighborhood? Odds are, someone nearby is weighed down with depression, battling with cancer, recovering from surgery, drowning his troubles with alcohol, or questioning her faith. Some may even be contemplating suicide—a sad reality that hit home for me a few years ago when a neighbor I hardly knew (he always kept to himself) took his own life inside the red pickup truck he usually kept parked in his driveway. I had no idea he felt so down and dejected. Whenever I saw him, he gave me a wave that looked friendly but simultaneously communicated a message that said, "Keep your distance." I wish I hadn't.

There's a fine line between a legitimate desire for solitude and the languishing loneliness that leads to despair. Robert Browning wrote:

I give the fight up: let there be an end, A privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.

But God remembers. He knows the name and the pain of the neighbor who has found "an obscure nook" in which to hide.

It's easy not to notice. We drive past those houses and apartment buildings we see every day without giving a single thought to those who live behind the tightly drawn blinds. It's easy not to care.

Until we remember the Good Samaritan.

Until we think about the biblical reminder to "pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up" (Ecclesiastes 4:10).

Until we remember Jesus' compassion toward the crowds who were harassed, helpless, lonely, and miserable, like sheep without a shepherd.

It sounds noble to talk about "the needs of the world," but if we open our eyes, we'll find some lambs to nurture right in our own backyards.

What are you doing to shepherd the flock on your block?