Coming Together Across Fence Posts

I could hear him from inside.

Screaming, bellowing, yelling as loud as his little mouth could.

 All the while jumping up and down on a tattered and torn trampoline that the carpenter had picked up off the side of the road, mended and now needs more mending.

His little frame grabbed the edges of the metal trampoline, pulled it over to where our fence meets the neighbors and screamed while jumping up and down, "hello guys!"

My four year old wakes up the neighborhood early in the morning with his sweet, screeching voice and I listen to the exchange of loud words between the kids, half tempted to put a stop to it.

But its been missing too long. 

The sounds of children laughing and playing and speaking their hearts to the whole world while going to great lengths to talk with neighbor children.

Fear hushes speech.

We could live next door for years and never know a neighbor or we know a neighbor and they move and the idea of meeting another new neighbor and another new neighbor becomes exhausting.

Exhaustion overrules the need for friendship and there's a missing out on what could have been.

If we awake to know there are people who care, people who enjoy our company, people who can offer advice and encouragement, we awake with more of a step to our walk knowing that we're within doors length of a helpful friend.

The mother of the boys next door, she comes over.

I'm in my raggedy clothes with unwashed hair and toys scattered all over the house, but she comes in and acts as though its no big deal and this neighbor really means it.

A couple of weeks later it's a party at her house and the boys run across the lawns with light-sabers and high pitched screams and this Mom's heart is heavy with hope.

The world can and is a good place and there are good people who come together in fellowship and communion, who will truly pick one another up.

 And that is what it's all about, good people coming together across fence posts and lawns. 

Good people who love enough to know that we're all hurting people who just need each other; who need to know that there's someone to lean on, someone who cares, someone whose willing to open their door and let us in, no matter what.