Lexington, KY - On warm summer nights, before I go up to bed, I go out the back door, walk around to the front of the house and stand for a few minutes. Our street is a cul-de-sac and at that hour I seldom see a car or a walker. I can hear night sounds of insects and the low hum of city traffic, but otherwise all is quiet.
People who come to live on this street of mostly modest houses usually stay for a long time. We have been here a quarter of a century and are nowhere near being the senior residents. It's a good place. Often when someone hears where we live they say, "Oh, yes," or "I love that street."
It's hard for me to put into words why I do these late night outings. Part of it may be that, like a kid, I want to put off going to bed. But mostly, I believe I go out and stand in the quiet darkness to breathe a soul-full of ambient grace.
On this street we know each other and in time of need can count on neighbors. There are inevitable troubles -
goodbyes, disagreements, family squabbles, divorce and what I can only describe as occasional lunacies. There have been tragedies, untimely deaths, but the inherent kindness of our common life transcends even the hardest times.
This is the story of that sort of kindness, first from our neighbors, but most important, in the end from another community, the church.
On one night walk, a little less quiet, I could hear music as the Oktoberfest at the nearby Catholic cathedral wound down. I saw someone standing a few doors away. I knew her and her situation: a teenager who used to live near us with her father and younger sister. She was looking at her former home, the place where she last knew happiness, now dark and vacant. When she saw me she approached and came inside to talk a little, but mainly just to be with us for a while.
A couple of months before, I was up early on a Saturday morning. As I opened the shutters I saw the girls' father watering their front yard. It was a dry time. My wife and I ran some errands later that morning, and when we returned there was a fire department EMT unit in front of our neighbors' house. The girls were in the front yard weeping. Their father had suffered a heart attack. My wife and I joined the neighbors gathered, ready to help any way we could. By noon their father was dead.`
The girls stayed with friends in the following weeks, their grandparents too elderly to care for them and all other family living hundreds of miles away. Could there be some way they could stay in the city that they knew? Various plans were considered and put aside. And then someone who knew the girls and their father at church stepped forward. I know her, have known her since she and my daughter became friends in the second grade. She is a successful professional woman, unmarried and used to living alone, but her heart went out to the girls, and she invited them into her home to share her life with them.
In the months that passed, times were not always easy, for everyone was in unfamiliar territory. We prayed for them daily. And it appears that in the end all will be well. Taking in the two girls was a brave thing to do, an act of loving kindness that bears strong witness to the meaning of the greatest commandments as Jesus taught them -
to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.