A Short Primer on Where to Start with Loving Your Neighbor

      How do we love? Start with the person next to you. This is literally what the word "neighbor" used in the command to "love your neighbor as yourself" means in Greek. When you love your neighbor, you love the person standing next to you. Start with the person or people immediately within your field of vision. What are their needs, wants, and desires? What are their hurts, pain, and loss? It doesn't matter if you know them or not, if they're friendly or not. How can you be kind to them right now, in this moment? Even if it's just a smile, an acknowledgement of their existence, a small recognition that they matter.

     To love your neighbor as yourself is to give them the same courtesy, the same benefit of the doubt, the same care and concern that you would give yourself. It is to look deeply at the person and at least try and understand who they are, where they've been, what they've suffered, and to empathize with them in all of it.

     To love your neighbor is to "see" them. Too often when pass by people and treat them as part of the background, NPCs in our own personal game. Think about the Walmart associate, the McDonald's crewperson, the bank teller, the homeless guy on the street, and yes, even your literal next-door neighbor. (It may surprise some, but there are whole neighborhoods and communities where no one actually knows who their neighbors are because they never interact with them.) There are people we get used to just "tuning out" as though they don't actually exist.

     Jesus "saw" everyone, no matter who they were. It didn't matter if you were a naked wretch in the gutter, a wealthy noble, his best friend from childhood, a total stranger, or even completely hostile to Him. He Himself never saw anyone as His enemy even if they saw Him as theirs. He didn't tune anyone out. You could see it in His expression and in His eyes when they made contact. When you talked to Him, it felt as if you and He were the only two people there. He noticed everyone no matter how in the background they seemed, and I wouldn't be surprised if He was constantly doing a mental triage of who needed His attention most in that moment, and appeared to take little thought of Himself except when He was made to by either His own body or the concern of His disciples surrounding Him.

     So, when we ask "how do we love?" Start with just the person immediately next to you and be kind to them, regardless of their disposition towards you.