Ask Not What Your Neighborhood can do for You...

Well, after what seems like two very long weeks, we finally have everything moved into our new home in Hattiesburg and the largest part of the boxes have been emptied and the items put into the proper spaces... well... ok... at least the boxes are in the house. Moving to Hattiesburg has been a challenge not only due to the enormous amount of junk we seemed to have accumulated over the years, but also because I continue to work in Meridian... and on the coast... so I seem to be on the road all the time.

Moving into the downtown area of Hattiesburg has also created some challenges, liking figuring out where to put the children in school, how to pay for that, and not least of all which house to buy. We now own a fairly large 90 year old home with all the thrills that come with that. Can you say constant maintenance?

Someone might ask, "Why in the world would you go to so much trouble to live in the downtown area?" And this would be a fair question. To live downtown we have to pay more for auto insurance and home insurance, due to crime rates in our zip code. We felt we had to pay for the kids to go to a nearby Catholic school that was diverse racially and where they could get a good education. As mentioned already, we had to buy an old house (the house is awesome by the way... just more house than we have had before). And of course, our neighborhood has certain other interesting characteristics, like the neighbors who have already come in a little bit intoxicated at 2 am, making more than their fair share of noise. All of these things could have been avoided simply by choosing to live in a neighborhood away from downtown... perhaps in the suburbs, where public schools are good, insurance rates are low, crime is rare, and the homes are relatively new. So why go to the trouble and expense? Well, for me it is truly about ministry.

Eric Bryant discusses the idea of picking our neighborhoods for ministry in his book "Peppermint- Filled Piñatas." Eric writes that Christians too often pick where they will live just like everyone else, "choosing to live in places that provide the greatest safety and convenience or have the highest rated school districts. Then, as we have more income, we move out of our current locations so we can have even greater safety and convenience and even better school districts. This very natural way of living, sadly, has a way of circumventing the impact we can have in our neighborhoods. We end up looking at our neighborhoods for what we can get rather than seeing them as places where we can find opportunities to give and serve." Choosing our neighborhoods this way too often means that we stay in areas where everyone is like us, probably Christian, or at least in our same economic condition, and opportunities to be a witness to God's love are fewer. Eric writes, "We should think more like John F Kennedy thought: "Ask not what your neighborhood can do for you, but what you can do for your neighborhood."

Our new neighborhood has ample opportunity for service and simple Christian hospitality, and that is why we chose it. Now if we can just find a way to live into that choice...