"On Not Hating Your Neighbor" by Clifton Bryant

I hear a lot of gunshots. Sometimes they're at a distance. Sometimes they seem like they're coming from the lot behind our back yard. Sometimes weeks go by between them, sometimes I hear multiple exchanges in one night. They don't frighten me. Never really have. I don't know why. It's not that I'm indifferent to whether or not one of those bullets hits me. Nor am I under any illusions that they couldn't. And it's not that I'm calmly facing that very slight risk for some noble purpose. I'm not calm about it at all. In fact, it's when I hear these gunshots that a lot of my uglier feelings about this neighborhood come to the surface.

I first noticed this not long after a high-profile shooting that took place a few months ago on the northern end of the neighborhood. It provoked outrage and grief within the community, as such things often do. The devastating consequences of the pride and rage that define so many relationships here were exposed for all to see. Left and right people were expressing a desire to build a community in which people live together in peace. Anyone who was not an utter fool could see that things needed to change.

A few days after the shooting, I heard three or four shots ring out from a nearby apartment complex. Spontaneously, I turned to one of my roommates and said, "I hate this place."

I did then, and often still do. I find it hard to respond to the sin-deranged folly that sends bullets flying around my home with anything other than contempt. I can sympathize with a lot of this neighborhood's problems. I can look at people trapped in cycles of poverty, addiction, and despair and want to reach them with the love of Christ. But the violence seems so foolish, and to continue despite so many grim illustrations of its futility, that it leaves me with nothing but anger. Not the holy kind of anger you have towards people you love who are hurting themselves. The kind of anger that says, "Go ahead and kill each other if that's really what you want to do, I just wish you would do it during the day so the gunshots wouldn't wake me up."

It goes without saying, I hope, that there's a better way to respond to this. The young man who is so caught up in his own self-image that he has to respond to insults with a gun is just as much a captive of sin as anyone else. He is in as much need of grace as anyone else and has as much of an opportunity as anyone else to receive it. And he may be an idiot, but God knows I sin in ways that defy common sense as well as his laws all the time.

When I find myself holding the neighbors I came here to love in contempt, the solution is to see the problem for what it is. Sin is everyone's basic problem, and there's no reason to single my gun-toting neighbors out for contempt and ignore the possibility of their redemption. History says that that redemption would be a miracle, but everyone's redemption is a miracle. It's in remembering that fact that I can overcome my anger at the foolishness around me and get back to loving my neighbors as Christ has called me to.

May, 2008