P.S. To Love Thy Neighbor

A friend of mine said to me, "Imagine if you had planted your neighbors plants? They could have been pretty annoyed with you." Certainly, they could have been, with every right, annoyed with me if I had planted someone else's Easter gifts in their garden. I hope I would have thought the whole thing out before I actually followed through with "loving thy neighbor." But this leads me to a whole other thought process. I really did want to love my neighbor and I really did want to follow God's command and I really did have the best of intentions and I really did love the idea of planting those flowers and I, I, I . . . who's this about anyway? . . . certainly not my neighbor . . . and there goes the good deed, lost in a sea of pride. God really does want us to love our neighbors, but in a way that our neighbors would appreciate. Last night someone said to me, "People who are hard to love are hard to love." It's easy to do an act of kindness for thy neighbor if the act is something we love to do. The real love comes from doing an act of kindness that thy neighbor would love. And as it turns out, God being the merciful and wise God that He is, I was provided with an opportunity to do an act of kindness when my neighbor said she'd walk with me. We spent the morning walking and talking and then sitting and talking and then standing and talking and then saying good-bye and talking. I do love to talk. Maybe this was an act of kindness on her part . . .