Ghost Town
I was out last night in the back yard cooking a tri-tip on the barbie. It was around 7PM. The night sky was clear. The moon was shining bright. You could almost hear the twinkle, twinkle of the stars. It was certainly quiet enough.
From my vantage point, I looked up and down the rows of houses in our neighborhood (a term that doesn’t mean what it used to mean). No one was home. 2 out 20 on a Wednesday night @ 7PM. Were they all at church? Possibly, but probably not.
As I reflected on the significance of this revelation I remembered that we hardly ever see anybody. The time doesn’t matter. The day doesn’t matter. The weather doesn’t matter. Our housing subdivision is a Ghost Town (without the period actors dueling it out in mock gunfights).
We were meant to be in community, to build and maintain healthy relationships. Impossible when people rarely see each other.
6 Responses to “Ghost Town”
Maybe you’re in some communist cover-up training camp where they’re all watching and studying your family to learn how to infiltrate American homes.
What movie was that Brad? There was a movie along those lines.
That is one thing I like about living in the south because that piece of that part of Americana still exists on our circle to some degree. It really came out when we were trying to recover from 3 hurricanes and our circle became a symphony of generators and chain saws as we all struggled to help each other.
Move to the South Bro and that way you can have Sonny’s BBQ on demand.
Uh, excuse me Randy. Cecil, maybe Randy can hope for a catastrophic event of nature to draw everyone closer together! Just joking….:)
Randy, we have lived in our house now for over 20 years. We know the neighbor on our left, one across the street, one two doors down, and one across the street (how many is that………4?). That’s it. Well, except for some way-y-y down the street that we either go to church with now or have in the past. Seems like after 20 years, it would count up to more than that.
That is a sad commentary on our culture. I miss really knowing my neighbors and being able to call on them and have them call on me. My former martial arts sparring partner moved across the street several years ago. We were all pretty excited about living just across the street … I see him maybe twice in a given month. And then from across the street … a wave and a nod.
Community! You hit the nail on the head. One thing we absolutely looked for when we moved back to Missouri was a neighborhood that offered community. More than just sidewalks and front porches - which was important to us - but places where people were outside doing things, walking their dog, etc. Randy, you know what we had in Arlington on our old street. We looked for something like that.
While we couldn’t replicate that street, we still managed to find about the closest thing to it. We have an annual block party; like cwinwc mentioned, during our recent ice storm we were all out helping each other. We have an annual Christmas party at a neighbors; have a neighborhood e-mail distribution list; on & on.
I think our church heritage has made it a little difficult to cultivate this sense of community. We’ve always focused on being in community with fellow “brothers & sisters” that we’ve forgotten how to relate to those people we live next to, we see at our kids school, we see at the grocery store or the local bank or the polling booth.
Not to overuse a word but just like our approach to parenting, we have to be intentional about community. It’s not easy for everyone and it’s certainly not easy when we pull into our driveway, close the garage door behind us & never see our neighbors.
You’ve struck a nerve here. We’re trying to approach our small groups at church with this in mind, making them as geographic as possible. It makes sense to be closest to those people you cross paths with most every day.
Great post! This is a great area for us to focus on as a church body & family.
We have always felt blessed by our neighborhood. Not just because of the quality of our neighbors but because they are actually around. We interact with one or more of our neighbors almost every day. In fact, one of the things the crash did was draw us all closer together and help us all to realize that we could rely on each other in times of need.
How cool is that?
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