LAST MAY and every May we celebrate Mothers’ Day. In June, we also celebrate Fathers’ Day. I know there are also Grandparents’ Day and Teachers’ Day. It’s really good that we have specific days to recognize and honor the great things our loved ones do at least once a year.
Up to this writing, we were wondering, why there is no special day set for our neighbors.
Here in Canada and likewise in the USA, neighbors hardly know each other because everybody is out during the daytime, busy with two or three jobs, or they are out managing their businesses. Weekends are of course spent with families, most often elsewhere away from home.
Houses here in the North American cities are mostly with wooden fences and others only bushes or flowering plants separate their properties from each other. This indicates that neighbors could be in close relationship if only they will give a little bit of their time for one another. In the Philippines however, tall concrete fences surround houses in subdivisions.
We are wishing that one day, lawmakers would consider giving one day of the year as a HOLIDAY to celebrate it with our neighbors – NEIGHBORS’ DAY, say in July, which is summertime here and in US, and the kids are away from school; in the Philippines and in other Asian countries, April would be fine.
It would be great to see neighbors (that means everybody) having fellowship with at least the family next door, having a barbecue party on their backyards, sharing food and gifts, their children playing and sharing their toys, two or three families having dinner together. What a wonderful world would that be on that day, we could imagine!!! Don’t you think, so? One family will cook one dish and the other another dish and so forth and so on, and it would be a day of feasting and sharing God’s blessings and knowing each other better and getting closer, and who knows, you will be able to bring your neighbors to your church and to the LORD?
Everybody has a neighbor, right? God commanded us to love our neighbor (Mat. 19: 19). It is a shame though that we don’t even know the names of the people who live beside our home. Yes, you know their faces, you greet each other “Hi!” and “Hello!” but that’s all.
The Bible also says that in times of need, our neighbors are in better capacity to extend help than our relatives who live miles and miles away from us. But because we don’t know each other much, we shy away from asking a favor from them. This is why sometimes somebody’s body is found lifeless without their neighbors knowing what happened.
Someday, and we’re praying and hoping that it will come true. Maybe we can even begin NOW, which is a very good time to start. Why don’t we organize NOW? We usually have our barbecue party inviting our friends who live afar. Why not our neighbors this time? Let’s start our NEIGHBORS DAY this summer.
That would be a great day, spreading joy and love to our very neighbors! On that special day, we would be sharing God’s blessings and telling them the wonderful things God has done for us. It would be an opportunity to share God’s Word to them.
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, anyway!