You Should Regularly Go For Walks In Your Neighborhood

Reflecting on one small step in loving our neighbors well

Photo by Sue Zeng on Unsplash

(A five-minute read.)

If you want to love your neighbor as yourself, you should regularly go for walks in your neighborhood.

If you want to gain trust, confidence, and good will, you should regularly go for walks in your neighborhood.

Also, if you don’t have a neighborhood, you should get one.

I know this sounds a bit dogmatic—but I trust you’ll allow me to be so for a couple minutes.

I was reminded of this again last week when my wife (Camille) and I went for a walk in our neighborhood. This is something we’ve done for quite a while—probably ever since our kids were old enough to spend a little time in our house by themselves.

Three or four times a week, we’ll take 30 or 40 minutes and walk up and down our street after Camille finishes school for the day.

Right now, as I may have explained before, we’re in transitional housing, having moved out of our house of 12 years in Bangor last summer, and biding our time until we move to Portland (hopefully) next month.

So for the last ten months we’ve been renting a basement apartment from some friends in a very nice neighborhood just outside of Bangor.

And as we were walking the other day, we heard some bull frogs crooning from a small pond that some of our neighbors have in their front yard. Since Camille absolutely loves frogs (for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me), we just stood there listening for a few minutes.

But then we noticed the owner of the house walking down her driveway toward the road.

So not wanting to be awkward, Camille said to her, “Oh, sorry! We were just listening to the frogs in your pond! They’re so cool.”

The woman said she didn’t even notice us standing there, but suddenly we found ourselves in a ten-minute conversation, with the woman telling us we were more than welcome to go over to the pond and look at the frogs—which we eagerly did (discovering that there were about a dozen huge bull frogs leaping around).

But the part that really struck me, which prompted my current reflections, was something the woman said to Camille. She said to her, “Yeah, I see you walking on this road all the time” (Camille is someone that can never sit still).

Why I find that so fascinating and interesting is because she had never met either of us (though it turns out her daughter used to be a patient of Camille’s brother, and she couldn’t say enough good about him), yet simply because she had seen Camille walking over and over and over again, Camille had instant credibility with her.

There was a certain level of trust that had been earned simply through Camille’s repeated act of regularly walking (I’m guessing the woman wouldn’t have been as quick to invite us to go over to her pond if she’d never seen us before).

Perhaps it seems like I’m making a bigger deal of this than is warranted. But I just think there’s something to be said for simple presence—of living out regular rhythms amongst and amidst people, which help us establish credibility and good will with them.

And such credibility and good will, built up over time, opens up further opportunities to bless and serve our neighbors in deeper and more meaningful ways—and to perhaps point them to a bigger hope than they may have conscious awareness of.

Of course, as a Jesus-follower, and one who believes in the beauty of a transcendent story, and would love for others to hear and experience that story, I think this is especially a “best practice” when it comes to effectively connecting people to that story.

And this is precisely why I feel the deep conviction to live in the city of Portland itself if I’m trying to start a new Jesus-community there.

Often times, people look at me with a puzzled look when they hear me say we’re trying to find a house in the city itself. “Why don’t you just live in a surrounding town and commute in?” they ask.

It’s very simple: in order to effectively connect with and establish good will among communities that have a deep suspicion of Christianity (which Portland does, regularly being ranked the most—or second-most—post-Christian city in America), long-term, organic, patient presence is an absolute must in my mind. (Plus, we’re not just trying to run a program once or twice a week in Portland which we commute to; we’re trying to form a community of people who are living out God’s story together.)

Simply put, trust is hard to establish when you’re living at a distance and the only time people encounter you is in non-organic and fleeting ways.

It instead takes repeated encounters, many of them silent and seemingly-unremarkable, to establish the sort of “relational capital” and trust that helps people open themselves up to your love and good intentions.

I could cite story after story of the ways my family and I very imperfectly tried to do this during our time living in the same house in Bangor for 12 years—and much of it was significantly aided by simple acts like going for regular walks.

And I could tell you of the myriad times various neighbors of ours rejoiced at our presence and kindness, and lamented about how our neighborliness is the way life used to always be but no longer is (again, this isn’t to imply that we’re some kind of heroes or have figured it all out—or that we were always good neighbors).

At the same time, this is not an evangelistic ploy I’m talking about. Yes, it’s a helpful—and perhaps even necessary—approach when it comes to ultimately connecting post-Christian people to a transcendent story, which, as a follower of Jesus, I’d always love to do.

But it’s also just learning to be a good neighbor.

When we regularly make the “neighborhood rounds,” seeking to be a positive presence, it puts us in position to build up that good will and make us aware of the specific ways our neighbors are in need of love.

We can thus learn of Maria, who needs help mowing her lawn; or Mike, who’s about to have open-heart surgery; or the Smiths, who just lost their grandson to leukemia.

We can rejoice with the Martinezes when they tell us their son just graduated from college; celebrate when Jessica introduces us to her newborn baby; and accept the Jacksons’ invitation to their Christmas party.

We can, in short, learn to truly be good neighbors—which the world, and likely your city or town, desperately needs a lot more of.

All by the simple act of regularly walking in our neighborhoods—with listening ears and open hearts.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.