It's A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

You remember that old Mr. Rogers song, don’t you? (Well, just in case you don’t the lyrics are below.) As a young person, I always thought the song was a little hokey, but now I see a different side to it.

Won't You Be My Neighbor

By Fred M. Rogers © 1967

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood,

A beautiful day for a neighbor,

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

It's a neighborly day in this beautywood,

A neighborly day for a beauty,

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

I have always wanted to have a neighbor just like you,

I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.

So let's make the most of this beautiful day,

Since we're together, we might as well say,

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

Won't you be my neighbor?

Won't you please, Won't you please,

Please won't you be my neighbor?

Simple, sweet words. So inviting…literally! It reaches beyond *my* neighborhood or *your* neighborhood. It reaches out to the ends of the earth. It represents not just the immediate areas in which we live. It represents the whole of creation. It’s inclusive, it’s warm, it’s friendly, it’s welcoming.

It seems in today’s world of privacy fences and automatic garage doors, we don’t even know who our neighbors are. And once we get into our houses and turn on our televisions, we watch from afar all our other “neighbors” in our cities and in our world. We watch their lives unfold on a big screen, and we shake our heads at their tragedies. Our mouths say we feel sorry. But our hearts remain distant as we sit comfortably in our air-conditioned houses.

Do you know who your neighbors are? Let me give you a little hint: they aren’t just the people you wave at as you pass their houses each day, or borrow a cup of sugar from.

But they could be:

**The single parent struggling to feed and clothe their children, or pay the electric bill**

**The child who has been trafficked and sold into slavery for sex, labor, or war**

**The pregnant teen mom who has nowhere to turn because her family has abandoned her**

**The orphan in Africa whose parents have died from AIDS, digging through the trash pile for tonight’s dinner**

**The dad down the street who just lost his job – for the second time in a year**

**The woman you see every week at church - on the outside she looks composed and polished, but at home she lives a daily hell of physical, mental and/or emotional abuse.**

Don’t you think that when any of these people get a glimpse into your life, they would like to be your neighbor? To be included in a warm, friendly, safe place?

And “since we’re together” in this world, shouldn’t we try to “make the most” of each beautiful day WITH them?

Isn’t there always something we can each do – even ONE small thing – to extend love to our neighbors?

How about starting here:

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’”

--Simone Weil

Listen…

     watch…

          learn…

               ask…

                    walk in their shoes.

Then…take action.

Help them.

Love them.

Lift them up.

Then, instead of just a neighborhood, we have a “beautywood”. Please, won’t you be my neighbor?

Life Clutter

Recently I’ve begun to have my eyes opened to the extreme poverty that exists in our world. I’ve been seeing images of entire families who live in a “house” smaller than my living room. They have no television, no phones, and their beds are often mats on the floor or hammocks only hung at night. It made me think about the luxuries in my life and what it is (or might be) like to live without them.

A few months ago, I discontinued my cable service. Now we get about 2 channels, and we really only watch one of those occasionally. Do we miss having cable and paying for over 200 channels that we rarely watched? Nope. That’s $65 going toward paying off my credit card debt!

I had a mowing service do my lawn for a while. And yeah…it was really NICE to come home and have the yard freshly mowed and trimmed. And it’s a huge pain in the butt to do it ourselves, but I’m saving nearly $70 a month. Half of that is going to my new Compassion child; the other half…to that awful old credit card debt.

In the age of cell phones, for the longest time I fought myself back and forth about having a land line in addition to the cell phone service. The biggest thing I was always told is that in an emergency, EMS can’t track cell phones. But at a minimum of $40 a month (almost ½ of the bill was “fees”), I decided it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I bet you can’t guess where that $40 is going. (haha)


There are other things I could (and will) “do without” as well. My gym membership will expire next March, and I’m not renewing. There’s a whole big, natural world out there to exercise in for free!


What about eating out/ordering take-out? More than once a week is too much!

Lattes? Sodas? Candy and snacks? Health-wise I should cut them anyway!


Now I’m not saying that life should be completely devoid of fun or treats. I believe that I’ve been blessed and that I am supposed to enjoy those blessings. But I also believe that a part of enjoying the blessings is sharing with others who are less fortunate.

"We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean.

But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop."

--Mother Teresa

Have you ever seen a child’s eyes light up at Christmas when they receive gifts they didn’t dare to dream about getting?

Have you experienced the beautiful smile of a homeless person to whom you’ve given money, shaken their hand, spoken to or simply acknowledged that they are a human being worthy of being noticed and loved?

What “life clutter” could you consider ridding yourself of, or at least cutting back on, in order to share your blessings with someone else?  You never know what will happen when you plant that little seed.