Who’s In Your Neighborhood This Summer?
By Julie Hawkins, Pastor of Ministry
The garage doors are open. The sprinklers are running next door. The mountain is out! This is summer in the Pacific Northwest, and for a few warm months, the walls between our lives come down just a little. We’re outside. Our neighbors are outside. Kids appear from houses you didn’t know had kids.
And somehow, most of us still manage to wave and keep walking.
I’ve been thinking about this in my own life lately. Our neighborhood is the kind where you can’t see the house next door; trees, distance, long driveways. It’s one of the things we love about it. There’s room to breathe, space to be, and we’ve been lucky enough to host people in a way that wouldn’t be possible somewhere more crowded. But that same gift has a quiet cost: we can go weeks without laying eyes on a neighbor. They’re right there. We just can’t see them.
So this summer, I made a small commitment. Every night after dinner, we walk. It started as a way to get outside, burn off some evening energy, and close the day. But somewhere along the way, it turned into something else. We’ve met people we’d lived near for years without knowing. We’ve had conversations that started with a wave and turned into something real. It turns out our neighbors are there; we just had to go looking.
Jesus had a habit of doing exactly this. He was almost always on his way somewhere: teaching, traveling, moving through towns. And yet the Gospels are full of moments where he stops. Not for the people who had appointments with him. For the ones who just happened to be in his path.
There’s a moment in Mark 10 when Jesus is leaving Jericho, surrounded by a large, loud crowd, and a blind man named Bartimaeus is sitting by the side of the road. He hears Jesus passing and starts calling out. The crowd tells him to be quiet. Too many people. Jesus is busy. But Jesus stops.
With the crowd pressing in and the whole day still ahead of him, he asks the most attentive question imaginable: What do you want me to do for you?
Not a quick fix. Not a hand-wave on the way past. Full presence. A real question. An open hand.
I love that question from Jesus, “What do you want me to do for you?” It makes me think about how rarely I’m moving slowly enough through my own days to ask it. Bartimaeus didn’t need Jesus to add him to the calendar. He just needed Jesus to stop.
The walk after dinner has reminded me that stopping is a choice. We have to decide to be somewhere long enough to actually see who’s there.
Summer makes that possible in small, tangible ways. The neighbors are out. The conversations happen on driveways and across fences. And once you’re actually in front of someone, generosity tends to follow naturally; the extra from the garden, the power washer you can lend, the backyard that could hold more people than you usually put in it. An open hand usually starts with an open eye and the willingness to pause.
Pick an evening this week. Take a walk after dinner as the warm days give way to slightly cooler nights. Go slowly enough to say more than hello. You might be surprised who’s been there all along, just waiting to be seen.
Jesus stopped for one voice in a crowd. We can stop for the one right down the road.
Pastor Julie