Neighbours = Humble

One of the things I can’t stand in life is the attitude of indifference and judging. Here is my tale of woe of how I realised I became indifferent and judgmental.

We own a townhouse in a fairly comfortable complex and the unit next to ours is a rental. Which means every two months we are welcoming in new neighbors. It would seem that we, TheVans, attract a certain type of neighbour.

The type who:
• have a family set-up of about 50 members,
• are generous in sharing their music taste at 10pm at night just as the
little ones are settling into a deep slumber,
• believe their personal calling is to service every messed up car u could
possibly think of and use their property as a scrapyard,
• they type that when you engage a conversation with you are praying their
loose false teeth don’t fall out of their mouth and bite your foot off,
• take off in the middle of the night without paying rent.

YOU KNOW THE TYPE THAT GOD USED TO MAKE ME HUMBLE!!!!

The main characteristic of my previous job was that of people. And anybody working with people would admit that it is a great privilege and honor but exceptionally draining at times. Sometimes I would come home from work and would be emotionally drained that even the thought of walking to the front door seemed like climbing Mt Kilimanjaro. At the same time everyone else was coming home from work so it would be buzzing.

Honestly, my strategy would be to literally make absolutely no eye contact with a single soul and to kind of do a standing up leopard crawl so that no-one would see me and start talking to me. It is an art I tell you. Ah! There you go judging me, come on we all know that old lady in our complex who is spying through her net curtains waiting for us to come home and then pounces on us like a toads tongue on a fly, totally unexpected.

Word got out a long time ago in our complex that I am a Social Worker, so people see me as a miracle worker.
People: “Hallo can you help me trace my fathers, mothers, uncle, second cousin who
lives in Poffadder who used to live in Kimberley.”
Me in my thoughts: “NO NO, I can’t, I am not a Private Investigator chop. Now go
brush your hair and leave me the freak alone”.

Anyways the reason I told you all the above was to try and make you understand that I had no energy for a single person in our complex, let alone our hill billy neighbors whom I already pre-judged before the first hallo was murmured.

Ok! Fast forward a few months and you find me about 12 weeks into my second pregnancy. A pregnancy that was not really booked into our calendar or schedule, so it totally caught me off guard and I had a hard time coming to terms with being a human incubator for the next 9 months, give or take a few.

We didn’t share the news with family and friends as it was just not something I wanted to share at the time as I was still getting used to the notion of being pregnant again and freaking out as I didn’t know if we were ready for number 2.

To cut a long story short, I was walking in our complex with Lexie-Grace when the mother of the next door neighbor came up to me and said: “ I can see that you are pregnant so I made you these receiving blankets and if it is not a girl then you can give them away to someone who needs them”. I was like, WHAT!!!! Not only did she go to the material store to buy the material, but she also stitched the edges of the blankets with yarn and by saying no words she told me that she can see that I am picking up weight :) You need to understand, we didn’t share the news yet and I hardly ever said a word to this lady in my life as I was, well to put it nicely; a self-righteous, indifferent, judgmental hypocrite. But on Sunday’s I was singing all the hallelujah songs, clapping my hands, doing the jig (you know the one where Pentecostals swing from side to side), but one thing I wasn’t doing was doing the real thing and that was loving my neighbor.

When she gave me those blankets I immediately got convicted and realised I embraced the attitude of something I loathed and didn’t hold dear that of being indifferent and judgmental. I was so sad about this realisation that I went home immediately and started journaling about this and asked God to forgive me as this is not traits I EVER want to have. Who the heck do I think I am to go thinking that I am better than others? And why did she reach out to me, shouldn’t I be reaching out to her as I need to be the salt? God slapped me around a bit that afternoon but I am glad it happened as I don’t want to be that person who is consumed by position, status, title, income, demographic, creed, colour etc.

God used our neighbors to make me humble again!

Those little pink receiving blankets were the very first things we got for our baby and holding them gave me a spark of joy for the very first time in my 12 weeks of pregnancy and the very next day we told our family and friends that we were expecting :)

As I end off this lengthy entry I am so aware that God is constantly using our neighbors to work in my life and keep me humble. About 3 weeks ago I was sitting at home with the girls contemplating my decision to become a stay-at-home mom and not feeling very useful to society. I had deep feelings of abandonment, lack of worth and wondered if I was still valued. As I was thinking all these crazy thoughts there was a knock on the door and there was my neighbor holding a plate filled with colorful cupcakes and she said: “I was thinking about you so I made you cupcakes”. As I shut the door with the plate of cupcakes in my hands I started crying and immediately my raging thoughts were silenced and my heart was at peace. I felt loved and knew then and there that God used her to show me that I matter <3