I have a neighbour
that screams like a banshee — or at least she used to. She doesn’t
anymore, and herein lies a tale.
Like many families, we
live in a semi-detached house with nothing more than a cinder-block partition and a little ancient insulation separating us from our neighbours.
You can’t hear everything that occurs on the other side of the party wall, but you
can hear plenty, especially when voices are raised.
We heard plenty. Regularly. Our neighbour made sure of it.
A Captive Audience
After all, she had a
captive audience of which she was blissfully unaware and a sonic arsenal at her
disposal like few women on the planet.
So we heard from her
whenever her husband or sons sinned against her in matters large or small. At
length, I might add. We heard from her when the City unilaterally removed a
tree from the boulevard out front without consulting our neighbour first. We
heard from her whenever the gardener would accidently blow a few handfuls of grass cuttings across the property line.
All, I will concede,
from a safe distance. My neighbour’s ire has never been directed at me. In
fact, whenever we talk she is all smiles and sweetness, a state I prefer any
day to either active hostility or passive-aggressive silence. I prefer it
primarily for the sake of testimony, but I also prefer it because experience
has demonstrated that any attempt to modify my neighbour’s behaviour, even in
the most gracious and conciliatory ways, ends in the emotional equivalent of a nuclear
meltdown.
Some fights are just
not worth it. It’s clear her husband feels the same way.
The Human Fire Alarm
My daughter does not.
Six months or so ago while I was at work, the human fire alarm next door let
loose on her teenager with a choice selection of expletives. He returned the
barrage, and mother and son went back and forth for close to an hour.
My daughter, usually
shy and reserved, reached critical mass. She went downstairs, knocked on the
neighbour’s front door, and made a clear and (I am told) polite request for a
little peace and quiet. She was met with a flurry of abuse, threats of legal
action, and a door slammed in her face. Undeterred, my daughter marched
back upstairs and made a call to our equivalent of Children’s Aid to report
parental abuse.
You know what? We’ve
been listening to the sound of silence ever since. It’s absolute bliss.
Fools and Folly
Now personally, I
would never have done it. It’s not that I’m afraid of confrontations: anyone
who knows me knows that. It’s that, as many of you know, when you are dealing
with someone that experience tells you cannot be reasoned with, escalation is
generally not the most prudent strategy. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself,” as the writer of Proverbs aptly puts it. Further, when you resort to the authorities
to fight your battles for you, expect the other side to do the same. I knew the
next time the noise on our side of the party wall rose above a whisper after
11:00 p.m., the chances of a chat with the constabulary at our own front
door had just increased significantly.
Also, I believe strongly in the authority
of parents — and that includes the authority of unsaved parents with questionable judgment and a
notable lack of impulse control. You don’t get to choose which God-given
authorities you obey, and that’s just how it is. It would take a lot to
persuade me that calling in the secular bureaucratic robot cavalry every time
the volume goes up next door is in the interests of anything other than assuaging
my own annoyance, not least because the eldest child next door is in his
mid-teens, and more than capable of giving as good as he gets.
The Official Christian Response
Now, some of you will
definitely disagree with my take on that, and it’s THAT reality that is of the
greatest interest here, I think.
You see, there IS no prescriptive,
legal, official Christian response to a noisy, out-of-control neighbour. There
just isn’t. All such responses must be filtered through the conscience,
knowledge of scripture and accumulated practical wisdom of the individual
believer. If you can find an unequivocal biblical command that deals with this
particular situation, go for it. I can’t.
Thus my daughter has
one reaction: a polite complaint. I have another reaction: save your verbal
shots for situations in which they might matter for eternity. Reading this, you
might well think of good reasons for finding a third or fourth option.
Therein, I think, lies
one of the beauties of the New Testament church: the primacy of the Holy
Spirit-guided human conscience in our walk before God.
Fully Convicted
In writing to the
Romans about disputable matters, Paul’s upshot is that while finding the best
answer to any question about personal conduct is always important, conviction
before God is even more important:
“One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God.”
So what matters most when I confront my neighbor — or decline to
confront her, as the case may be — is not so much the act itself as the fact that I have
consciously brought God into it. It is the obedient awareness of God in the
situation that sanctifies it and makes our action or deliberate inaction
pleasing to him.
Honor and Thanks
If I go to my neighbour’s door conscious of
the presence of God with me, the chances I will shout at her, even if I’m very
irritated, go way down. If I go to her door determined to honor my Saviour, the
odds of me returning fire when she cuts loose and slams the door in my face are
vastly reduced. If I go to her door giving thanks for the opportunity to speak
to her on God’s behalf, the odds of me gossiping about her bad behavior to
others after the fact drop significantly. If I refuse to act until I am fully
convinced of the rightness of my choices before God, the odds of me calling
Children’s Aid vindictively and spitefully become microscopic.
Mistakes and slips can still happen, of
course, but they happen a lot less when we have the honor of God in our sights.
Likewise, if I stay home and do nothing at
all because I am fully convinced from scripture that my aural comfort is less
important to God than my neighbour’s parental autonomy, or because I am convinced my
witnessing opportunities with my neighbor will be better if I hold my peace about
her vocal gymnastics, I may well be right or wrong about these things; only God
knows. But I would not honor God better by letting my temper guide me instead of my conscience. (If I were to stay home out of cowardice, laziness,
indifference or mere pragmatism, that’s another story, of course.)
Why? Because I’m doing (or not doing) these
things for the Lord, not for myself.
Sinful, selfish acts simply CANNOT be performed “for the Lord” no matter how
cleverly we try to justify them to ourselves. As Paul puts it later in the same
passage, “Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.”
What
We Can and Can’t Control
Anyway, our banshee has been banished, at
least temporarily. Perhaps my neighbor fears the authorities. Or maybe having a
young girl tell you she has heard every inappropriate word you’ve uttered for
the last several years is more embarrassing to some people than others. Or even
better, it’s not impossible she has had time to think over her behavior and is
genuinely contrite. I can’t tell you because I don’t know. When we interact
with others, we don’t get control of the outcome. Sometimes we don’t even get
to see it.
We do, however, have control of what we do,
and whether or not we do it for the glory of God.
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