Live where you are planted.

That was my takeaway from a Bible study called Stepping Up that I started almost 12 years ago.  It actually took me almost four years just to finish the study!  When I first started it, Cody was a few weeks old and I didn’t get very far – shocking, I know.  But one of the things I underlined was “The psalmist meant that he was a long way from home and from where he wished to be – that he felt like an alien.  Can you relate?”

YES!  I could relate.  We lived among mostly families with much older children than Cody and didn’t have any close friends in our own town.  Within two years, we decided to move to my hometown to at least be near family…a decision we tried to make a reality for another two years until we finally accepted it just wasn’t going to happen.

I started the Bible study again, randomly it seemed, and wrote words of the same theme:

“I am living in the wrong place.”

Yet within a few months, I wrote,

“I am where God wants me.  He wants to prosper me here.  My part is to live and serve where He has put me.”

Fast forward almost eight years and “Live where you are planted” has regularly popped into my head, not as a reminder of what to do but as I’ve seen the outcome of choosing to live that way.

I have an amazing friend who is also a neighbor right across the street!  Another lives just three blocks away and several more live in the same town.  I have been so blessed with friends once I stopped looking and longing elsewhere and decided to live where I’m planted.  Now it took some work – I took the initiative to introduce myself and connect with them, and truthfully none of them even lived here when I first started that study.  But that study made me ready to reach out as they did move to town.

And just so you don’t think I live in some unrealistic suburban utopia, trust me, I have some “bad neighbor” stories too (oh, my).  People are people, there is no perfect neighbor (not even me).  And while I do have a very good friend right across the street, most of my neighbors are just that – neighbors.  People who I happen to live next to.  People who God can use in my life and in whose lives He can use me.

Three years ago, while I was on crutches and Chuck had a weight lifting restriction pre-open heart surgery, we lived through the snowiest February on record in Minnesota.  ON RECORD.  It snowed virtually every day…while I was on crutches and Chuck couldn’t shovel heavy snow.

Enter three separate neighbors, out there with shovels and their kids and snowblowers, clearing snow and roof raking for us.  It was wonderful – and it felt really uncomfortable.  And they were each happy to help out.

Two years ago, one of those neighbors ended up hospitalized for weeks with pneumonia and with a long recovery once he came home.  We and our other neighbors then shoveled and snow-blowed (I just looked that up – it’s a word) and roof-raked for them. 

Ah yes, living where we’re planted.  Even in the snow…

More recently, my husband went to talk to a different neighbor about something and came home with really sad news about some medical issues they are facing.  These are not neighbors we see or talk to much.  No waving if they drive past our house like we do with the other neighbors.  But after Chuck learned about their current hardships, he started texting just to check in and even brought over some fresh baked bread and hot chocolate as pick-me-ups. 

Then a few weeks ago, Cody and I were driving home from school and, as I pulled into our driveway, I noticed a truck stop in the road behind us and someone lean out of the window waving.  At first, I thought he was trying to tell me I had a light out or something, so I backed up to talk to him.  Cody asked who it was as I realized it was the neighbor.  He wasn’t waving because something was wrong; he was just waving!  I got out and walked toward him and he said, “I just wanted to say ‘Hi.’  Hi, Cody!”  And with a big wave and a big smile, he drove away.

In the five to six years that they have lived by us, I have never seen him smile like that, beam like that…and a family member is dying.

How can he smile simply by seeing us driving ahead of him?  Because Chuck threw a lifeline out to him and he caught it, perhaps on his last, big gulp of air, his last breath, before going under.  Before the waves covered him and he couldn’t make it back up.

The pain of watching his loved one suffer didn’t disappear…but it maybe dissipated a little as the weight was held by another person as well.

I met a new neighbor this summer.  We had connected through social media, both following the same page.  At one point, he offered to bring our family something and, as we figured out how to exchange it, we learned we live only three blocks apart.  We have lived that close for seven years and he remembered walking his dog past our house.  Three blocks separated us and we only connected through a worldwide public Facebook page!

This winter he texted me. 

He had hollowed out a space in the ice globes and put a candle in them to light up the dark winter nights.  He brought them over and they have lit up my front steps ever since. Two of my neighbors have commented on the glowing globes, noticing both his and mine. 

People notice light in the dark.

Such simple ways to offer light to neighbors: shoveling, a loaf of fresh-baked bread, an ear.

A lit candle punching a hole in the darkness.

So many ways to live where I’m planted.