I have a friend who gives really over the top Christmas presents to people she barely knows. As the holiday season approaches she spends hours poring over catalogs and roaming the aisles of some pretty high-end stores. She buys ties and games and dresses and belts and electronics – you name it. She carefully considers everyone on her list and does her best to buy the most thoughtful, appropriate, and generous gifts she can. When she gets home, she painstakingly wraps them in the most attractive (and expensive) papers and tissues and ribbons she can find – no store-bought wrapping for her. Then she puts on the nametags. Some presents go to her kids, others go to friends and co-workers, and there’s always a fair number that sit carefully wrapped up and ready for pick up by the mailman, the newspaper guy and snowplow man. While acknowledging the overtones of self-interest that influence every aspect of our gift giving, I figured my friend was simply trying to impress people when I asked her why these great gifts were going to near-strangers. I’ll never forget her immediate and sincere response: she was trying to love her neighbor as herself.

Giving great gifts to those we love happens all the time. Giving great gifts to those we hardly know is rare. What impressed me about my friend was the sheer practicality of it all – how she brought this Good Samaritan lesson down to earth. ‘Loving your neighbor as yourself’ has always been one of those grandiose, BHAG goals that perhaps goes without deep reflection because of its octopi complexity. But my friend’s Christmas giving made me think. How might I bring this most important of all Christian commandments down to size?

I walked into my backyard to turn on the sprinkler and thought about ways I could water my neighbor’s parched lawn. I went to the supermarket where I walked up and down the aisles thinking about my neighbors, downtown, who don’t have enough to eat. I passed the basket at church thinking about all of the people who look to my church for strength to get through their lives.

One of the most stark expositions of this commandment is offered by St. Paul who opines in Philippians 2:3-4, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” How might we take the spotlight off of ourselves and shine it on others? What one practical thing can I do today to be a neighbor?

Reading
The Prophets (Vol. I and II) – Abraham Heschel
Blood and Thunder – Hampton Sides
Wild at Heart – John Eldredge