"But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;"
~~ Matthew: 5:44
Neighbor Dispute
I gave a testimony at our Wed. prayer meeting one night that gave the pastor and the
congregation a smile. (a laugh, actually). Although I didn’t intend it to be that humorous,
my presentation must have lent to the humor. The story goes like this:
For several years, my next door neighbor, (I’ll call her Dee), had serious problems with her
next door neighbor on the other side of her house. Even though this guy had two dogs of his
own, he would go into a rage when my neighbor’s dogs barked. Most of the time, the guy
was drunk when he went into his rages. Sometimes not. I had several run-ins with him when
I let Dee’s dogs out for her when she was away, but this other neighbor’s hate towards Dee was
directed toward her even when her dogs were in the house. Sometimes he would just stare at
her and then start cursing at her for no reason at all.
After I had a long talk with him one Christmas morning, he apologized to me for his
behavior, and blamed his “attitude” on working midnight’s and the other dogs barking. He
seemed much less aggressive, even friendly, towards me after that, but he continued to harass
Dee.
Well... sometime later, Dee, who is also a Christian, was all upset about this nut case cursing
at her again, and said she hoped something BAD would happen to him. I told her that the
thing to do was to pray GOOD THINGS to happen to our enemies, and let God take care of
the situation, as told in Matthew: 5:44 and Luke: 6:28. So, we agreed to agree in prayer
about this situation, and prayed that the other neighbor would get a job offer (out of town)
that he couldn’t refuse, or find a nice new home somewhere else.
ONE WEEK LATER, Dee said to me, “I don’t think those people are living there anymore.”
There was no for sale sign on their house to indicate that it was even on the market, but he and his wife had, in fact, MOVED OUT! Another neighbor said that she was told that they moved into a
new house in another township.
When I gave the testimony, since the pastor got a chuckle out of my story anyway, I added,
“it’s a good thing that we didn’t pray for fire to come down on him.”
But I have no doubt that this IS an answered prayer.
