Call to Action: 50 Ways To Love Your Neighbor

A compelling list of tangible ways we can love others as Christ has loved us.

Read it all
HERE

Some highlights from the list:
13. Look up the closest registered sex offender in your neighborhood and try to befriend him.

26. Organize a prayer vigil for peace outside a weapons manufacturer such as Lockheed Martin. Read the Sermon on the Mount out loud. For extra credit, do it every week for a year.

29. Go through a local thrift store and drop $1 bills in random pockets of the clothing being sold.

32. Go to an elderly home and get a list of folks who don´t get any visitors. Visit them each week and tell stories, read the bible together, or play board games.

34. Create a Jubilee fund in your Church congregation, matching dollar for dollar every dollar you spend internally with a dollar externally. If you have a building fund, create a fund to match it to give away and by mosquito nets or dig wells for folks dying in poverty.

35. Become a pen-pal with someone in prison.

41. Cover up all brand names, or at least the ones that do not reflect the upside-down economics of God’s Kingdom. Commit to only being branded by the cross

43. Eat only a bowl of rice a day for a week to remember those who do that for most of their life (take a multivitamin). Remember the 30,000 people who die each day of poverty and malnutrition.

49. Serve in a homeless shelter. For extra credit, go back and eat or sleep in the shelter and allow yourself to be served.

BONUS: Come up with your own list of ways to love your neighbor. Do at least one of them before the end of the week.

-kg

LOCAL HOUSE CHURCH HELPS SENIOR WOMAN

*from the OC Register article HERE

Miracle on Piper Place by Lori Basheda (OCRegister.com)

It all began the day the fires raced up over the hills toward Piper Place. Suddenly a megaphone was blaring: neighbors had 10 minutes to evacuate.
Darcie Campbell and her husband Ken scrambled to get in the car when they saw a neighbor walking slowly to her car two doors down.

The Campbells knew that Sandy Maitlen lived in that house, the one with the overgrown weeds. But no one ever really saw Sandy. And the less people saw of her, the more the tales grew. "We all sort of shunned her," Darcie says.

But now here she was walking to her car in the smoke, looking shaken. Ken ran over: Do you need help? he asked.

And she started crying.

After the fires, after everyone on Piper Place was safe to move back, Darcie and Ken made a decision that they would get to know Sandy. “And actually, our minds were blown,” she says. It turns out Sandy, now 66, is a perfectly friendly lady who has lived on Piper Place since the mid ’70s. Divorced, she raised her two children alone. One daughter died after surgery five years ago. She now has a grown daugther who lives with her, along with a granddaughter.

One day Sandy let Darcie into her house. ”That this was in my neighborhood, on my street, and we never even noticed her need,” Darcie says, trailing off.

In one bathroom there was a hole in the floor, no toilet. In another bathroom, the toilet overflows. There were pipes leaking in the ceiling, black mold, no heat, two broken windows and the front door was hung upside down, on one hinge.

Darcie is part of a Thursday night fellowship group that meets behind Sandy’s house at the home of Julie and Noel Cruz. ”Can we all come together?” she asked them.

And come together they did. This weekend about 50 people are converging on Sandy’s house, carrying cans of paint and tool boxes.

"It's sort of unbelievable," Darcie says. "People used to tell stories if they saw a shadow in her house, and behind that was this very sweet lady."
Sandy chuckles at the idea. "I just tried to do things myself. I didn't want to be a bother to people, so we kind of kept to ourselves."

And now: "It is just beyond my wildest imagination," she says. "I'm just overwhelmed with all the goodness and kindness."

If you want to join the gang of people helping Sandy or donate anything, call Darcie’s daughter Stacie at 714-507-0859 or staciedthomas@yahoo.com

**
NOTE: Some of Darcie's neighbors and friends from a house church on her street will be painting, sanding and doing an "Extreme Home Makeover" of Sandy's house from March 20th - 22nd. For more information and to help out go HERE