Everyone Can Love Their Neighbor

When you think about the great commandment you probably think of this: 

 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.  The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.”

 But does Jesus mean even when you are under resourced?  Mission Southside can be found in 20 under resourced apartment communities around Johnson County.  When we go in, it is not with the mindset that we will do everything for that community and enable them.  It is with the mindset that we are loving our neighbors in community WITH one another.  It is not an US and a THEM, it is a WE.

At one local apartment complex, a resident named Pilar, delivers welcome baskets to new residents.  She creates them with items from Mission Southside and some items donated by the site team.  This has become her little ministry.  She welcomes people to the apartment community, she invites kids to Homework Huddle and moms to bible study.  She finds out is people have very little or are perhaps sleeping on the floor and she contacts Mission Southside to perhaps get a bed for kids sleeping on the floor.

At another complex a gentleman who has lived there for 8 years has started a Food Co-op Ministry.  He retrieves the food that is sorted at Mission Southside on Fridays and delivers it to his apartment complex.  He knows when his neighbors have been in the hospital, he knows the neighbors who perhaps have recently lost a job.  He also knows the single moms who struggle every month to keep food on the table for their kids.  He works at McDonalds, but happens to be off on Friday.  This gentleman walks a little bit taller and is doing his part.  He even has a Mission Southside t-shirt. 

We can all love our neighbors.  We all have something to give.  It may be our time, it may be our talent and it may even be our money.  But all of these things can help to raise up leaders right in the communities we are serving, and empower them to bring what they have to give.