If you were to come to my neighborhood, you would notice palm trees lining my block like guards outside Buckingham Palace. If you looked a little closer, you might even notice “please do not litter” neatly spraypainted in green on sidewalks and street corners. Depending on the time of year, you might find words like “love” or “peace” either written in chalk or etched out from pressure washing on the sidewalk. But chances are, no matter the time of the year, you will catch my neighbor Liam, the man responsible for it all, at work in his yard.
To paint a picture, we don’t have a Homeowners Association where I live. We have a Liam, and honestly, that’s basically the same thing. This will stimulate all kinds of movie-and-commercial-inspired caricatures of someone measuring the height of your grass, hedges, and mailboxes. Liam’s not that. He’s our mostly harmless, generally well-meaning neighbor, who, for as long as he’s lived in his home, has been on a personal mission to elevate the neighborhood. He’ll plants trees in your yard, pressure wash your house, purchase trash pickers for everyone to clean up litter in the neighborhood, and hound the city until they repaint the roads.
If you were to ask, though, he’d say it’s his way of elevating the neighborhood. He’s lived in higher income neighborhoods and, in his mind, the only difference between their neighborhoods and ours is that they care. His thought is that maybe if he can beautify his home and make small improvements on other people’s homes, there’s a chance the owners will begin to invest as well, and our neighborhood can be better.
These days I’m grappling with the idea that mission is as simple as blessing. I often get intimidated by where to start and find myself hung up on how to build trust with non-Christian friends. I can try to strategize conversations and have the right questions and segues prepared. I’ll spin my wheels trying to determine how the good news is good news for a given people group. But what if mission is as simple as seeing a need and doing something in your power to meet it?
This is simple but not easy. To bless requires intentionality. Michael Frost in Surprise the World writes, “blessers must become students of those whom they bless. We must become attentive to the needs, fears, hopes, and yearnings of our neighbors in order to bless them appropriately[1]. The ability to listen – with our ears but also to see with our eyes is crucial to any missionary enterprise. You have to discern what would actually bless a community. It’s not just what we think, but it requires deep listening, assessing resources, and allowing those things to converge. It requires an element of love that puts aside our agenda to communicate love to another person. If I had more time, I’d explore Richard Chapman’s work on love languages and how that potentially applies to mission.
But when mission gets framed as blessing, I realize that my biggest hindrance is myself. My fear is always that I’m not the person to try this out. Perhaps I’ve misheard both God and those I want to bless. Mission involves the crossing of boundaries, which is scary. But frightening as it is, it’s also what makes us different as Christians. Society abides by social contracts and boundaries that keep us siloed. We primarily look out for ourselves which means while we don’t cause harm to anyone, we don’t go out of our way for anyone either. When someone does, it runs counter to the story we live in.
Maybe that’s why I find Liam so fascinating. He hardly ever asks to do these things. He just does it. It never occurs to him that he might not be the person to do a thing. If anything, it’s the opposite. His problem is that never stops to listen. He shows me that gifting without listening isn’t a blessing. It’s an imposition.
I’m ashamed to confess that in the past our neighborhood (me included) made fun of and laughed behind his back. The cynical parts of us suspected his gestures were less about us and more about increasing his property value and elevate the curb appeal to his lady friends. But even if that were true, it begs the question of what a person would have to believe to carry themselves that way. Liam does it because he has a sense of ownership, which gives him a sense of responsibility to the community. If that’s true of him, then what’s my excuse?
Liam may bless because he lives there, but we do it because we’ve been commissioned by God himself. Jeremiah talks about seeking the welfare of the city. This is what it means to bless. It’s not to come in with a predetermined program, but to look around and to act from a place of listening and love. It’s not to be done manipulatively, which is always possible, but from a genuine, heartfelt affection for the context. Or maybe even in hopes that in acting, your heart will grow for the people.
If blessing comes from love, I think people will notice. It may be misinterpreted but it will be received because it comes from a genuine place. Perhaps in genuinely blessing those around us, we may live the kinds of lives that inspire onlookers to ask why we are the way we are. It’s there we get to profess the hope we have in Christ.
[1] Frost, Michael. Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People (p. 37). The Navigators. Kindle Edition.
Tomy Wilkerson 