The Worst Neighbor in the World
THE HARDEST COMMAND IN THE BIBLE is “Love your enemy.” Another tough one is “Love your neighbor.” But what happens if your enemy and your neighbor are one and the same?
In the state where I’m from, there was no shortage of bad neighbors; I used to be one of them. But before I was a bad neighbor, I was a bad son which got me kicked out of my home at nineteen. On my own, nobody mattered but me: my place, my comfort, my peace. One night I threw all the patio furniture into the swimming pool after the apartment manager told me to get rid of my waterbed (which wasn’t allowed in the first place). My next-door neighbor ratted me out, so I bent all her BBQ utensils into U-shapes. No one ever figured it was me, but surely, they suspected. Instead of getting rid of the waterbed, by the way, I hooked a garden hose to my kitchen faucet, turned it on, and let the water “drain” out my bedroom window onto the driveway below for eight hours. I still slept soundly that night.