Love Your Neighbors

 

        I saw this meme for introverts (see photo above) this morning and I laughed as I was reminded of an incident last year. I was in a small restaurant (just a stone’s throw away from our house) buying something and there’s this lady with her young son sitting beside me. We’re in one table. We’d been waiting for around probably ten minutes for the food we ordered when she started talking to me (I was busy with my phone).

     “Kumusta ka na?” she asked me.

     “Okay lang,” I said, surprised that she would ask me that.

     Then she started small-talking me, and I’d just smile and nod and answer tersely, wondering why this stranger was talking to me like we’d been a part of each other’s life.

     It turned out that we were former neighbors (she just left the apartment beside our house a few weeks ago that time), and we were neighbors for years. Lol. And she’d often see me going out of our house, sometimes walking the dog or on a bike—and yet, I didn’t know she existed.

     Jesus said to love your neighbors, it’s the second most important commandment, and I didn’t even bother to know our neighbors.

     As to our present neighbors, most of them, I’d meet them in a narrow but bright alleyway, and I wouldn’t probably even recognize them.