Love your neighbour, even the one you can't seeJason Fileta - 14 Oct 2013

I carry this stone with me wherever I go.  It’s a reminder that I am to love my neighbors-- those seen as well as unseen.   Often times this command causes us to look for those in our midst who are in need, but today the command is complicated by globalization. Our neighbors might be halfway around the world.

Grab hold of your shirt, feel the fabric in your hands, look at the seams.  Somebody made that.  Somebody held two pieces of fabric together and ran them through a sewing machine. Is this man, woman - or God forbid child - not also our neighbor?  How do we love them if we don’t even know them? 

Perhaps this is the first step to being neighborly—taking time to know our unseen neighbors.  What is their condition? Are they the victims of exploitation? Those of us who claim Christ ought to ask: With my purchases am I supporting life-giving work, or am I supporting exploitative corruption that perpetuates poverty?  It is a big and difficult question to ask, and in a world that rewards corruption it is radical discipleship to not just ask this question, but also live in light of the answer. 

Back to the stone. I got this stone from a quarry in Kampala, Uganda.  The woman who crushed this stone is named Mary.  She was an IDP (fled from war), and ended up living in a slum, working in a quarry.  She worked tirelessly crushing stones to make barely enough money, to buy a little food, to survive another day.  Her work is dangerous—she lost both her husband and mother to that quarry.   Mary’s condition was perpetuated by corruption at many levels –the owner of the quarry, the government supposed to be monitoring these things, the warlords who caused her displacement in the first place, the builders who buy the material so cheap no questions asked.   I don’t want my willful ignorance about the global systems I am a part of to allow me to be added to that list. 

Mary is my neighbor, deeply loved by her creator—I carry this stone as a reminder of that.  

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