A grace worth cultivating

We took a brisk, drizzly walk to our neighborhood coffee shop this morning. There and back, we commented on how bright the leaves looked against the backdrop of gray, the still blooming cosmos huddled up against this house, the clever Halloween decorations on that house, and street after street of campaign signs that seem to multiply overnight like mushrooms on a log.

Not much has changed on the best little block on all of W. Cucharras St. since the last go-round four years ago. The neighbor on one side of us still wants to “make America great again.” The neighbor on the other side still plans to “grab him by the ballot.” And though we have clarity in how we will be voting in this election, our household’s only stake in the ground is the chalked blessing above our door, marking our home as an outpost of a kingdom that is not of this world, whose King stretched out his loving arms, destroying the dividing wall of hostility in his own broken body, that all the people of the earth might look to him and be saved.

Another thing that hasn’t changed in four years? These neighbors’ insistence on taking care of one another. We gathered last weekend in a neighbor’s backyard to celebrate two birthdays on our block. We laughed and ate. We told stories and commented on how fast the kids are growing. We sang and raised our glasses. We devoured a cake with the most divine cream filling from our favorite Dutch bakery. The opinions are as diverse as they are strong among this group of neighbors, but we have lived too much life together on this street to see each other as enemies over the signs that grace our yards for a few weeks every four years. 

The loudest voices with a white-knuckled grip on the microphone would tell us that the stakes are too high, the situation too urgent, to bother with love, honor, or seeking to understand.  But in quiet corners of our communities, people are still committed to one another’s good, even across deep difference. 

This commitment to the common good and love among neighbors is not without cost. It will cost you the thin confidence of easy answers to complex questions, the brittle safety and emaciated camaraderie of an “us vs. them” mentality, the temporary satisfaction of the snarky meme, the simple checking for Rs and Ds to make quick work of our right to vote, and a false sense of control over a future that always ends up holding things more good and beautiful and more difficult and devastating than anyone could have predicted. 

But it is a grace worth cultivating.