The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson no one learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of responsibility for you.
Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities
According to author Shauna Pilgreen, neighbors might not be your BFFs, but they’re your wall-sharers, your fence-sharers. God might have more for these relationships, but you’ve got to start the introductions.
In Pilgreen’s words, if we are to live sent, we go to the neighbors to make the introductions.
And to make introductions, we must first pay attention.
Tim Soerens believes that our capacity to be fully present in any given moment is constantly under assault, and this poses a grave danger to making progress in following the way of Jesus in our everyday life.
The world beyond our house and street is impossibly overwhelming and messy. But as Barbara Brown Taylor said, “It is not necessary to take on the whole world at first. Just take the three square feet of each on which you are sitting, paying close attention to everything that lives within that small estate.”
Paying attention is not terribly complicated, but it will ask more of us than we ever imagined.
This issue of SUMS Remix looks at solutions that will help you learn to pay attention to the world around you. The solutions include:
27gen.com 