Love Your Neighbor.

Our homeowner's associations (HOA) paid us a visit. Again. For the third time. I mean, the first time was in the form of a direct e-mail about trash on our porch, and the second was in the form of an all HOA (group shaming?) e-mail when we overfilled the dumpster with said trash. And now we had a personal visit about the cleanliness of our vehicles. My first reaction to hearing the recent request was to get defensive. Then I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I don't want to be, "those people." I wanted to be the perfect, never-gets-into-any-type-of-trouble HOA member. But let's be honest. This is the first time we've lived in an area with an HOA, and we aren't the neatest, cleanest, most studious people. But you know what? We signed the HOA agreement. These are our neighbors. God calls us to love them.

Thankfully, my husband received the most recent HOA visit. The person greeted him respectfully, and he responded respectfully. Might the complaint seem petty? To us, yes, but not to them. And you know what? We can love our neighbors by taking care of it. Getting defensive, or griping and complaining does nothing for them, for us, or for our testimony. 

God calls us to be good neighbors. Martin Luther, as cited by Tom Nelson in his book, Work Matters, states that “God does need our good works, but our neighbor does. (p. 123). In this case, our neighbors need us to clean up a bit. It really isn't that hard. 

Cleaning up our property is an issue of personal choice. But so is living in an area with an HOA. And so is choosing to serve God by being good neighbors.

People often cite The Golden Rule when encouraging people to treat others the way they themselves want to be treated. "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Matt 22:39, NIV) can also mean loving your neighbor enough to respect their own preferences and opinions, though. Hopefully it's obvious that we would not violate God's moral or written law to obey our HOA, but this issue isn't about that. It's an issue of preference. And we're going to take care of it. May the way that we do so honor and glorify our Lord, the one who first loved us.

References:

Barker, K.L. (Ed.) (2008). Zondervan NIV Study Bible. Zondervan.

Nelson, T. (2011). Work matters: Connecting Sunday worship to Monday work. Crossway.