What to do on Monday--Who is My Neighbor?

Today is one of the holiest days in the Christian world--Good Friday. So I believe that today is different from other Fridays and deserves a different message. No matter your beliefs, this article from Paddy Kearney from Durban, South Africa speaks to our responsibility as people and as citizens. He writes of a custom in South Africa to carry the cross through the streets in silence. This year the theme of the processional is the question that Christ posed in the parable of the Good Samaritan, "who is our neighbor?" Random acts of kindness got their start on the road with the injured man and the Good Samaritan. This is what we are supposed to do: help people less fortunate, those in need, or sometimes those who have made bad choices. I want to focus on the latter today.

In the research for Smart Communities I ran across an analysis of what makes the poor poorer than the rest of us. One author wrote in essence that at least part of the answer is people making bad decisions with no support system. That could be everything from too much debt to substance abuse but basically no room for error. That is where the Good Samaritan story has real teeth. Doing for people who have screwed up and helping them get things turned around is a different kind of neighborliness than we are used to displaying. That is not to say that we shouldn't help those who find themselves in bad circumstances through no fault of their own but rather that our outreach and our compassion should and can reach further. That for me is God's grace for them and for us. On Monday, think about who is your neighbor.