Neighbors

Some fragmented thoughts on our resident robin, friends in the Middle East, the fast-changing garden, and the reclamation of a song

Thursday, May 21
Grand Rapids, Mich.

A few weeks ago, pieces of dried grass began piling up atop the light outside our kitchen door, on the back deck. It didn’t take me long to clock what was happening, and my heart thrilled: A bird was trying to build a nest.

Honestly she didn’t seem gifted in the construction arts. Almost as soon as she’d bundle some grass atop the light, the wind would begin to unravel it, until it looked as if our light had grown a long, unruly mullet. One strong gust, and it all fell to the deck. Day after day, the grass kept appearing; again and again, it kept falling. Soon, part of our deck had a thick carpet of dried grass.

It wasn’t all the wind’s fault. One afternoon, I saw the bird perched on a fencepost. She was an American robin, and her beak clutched yet more building materials. She flew to the light and carefully began arranging it. Apparently content with her progress, she turned to resume her scavenging, and as she took flight, her tail feathers knocked her whole collection to the deck.

Maybe it’s her first time, I thought. Maybe she’s never done this before.

Robins need mud as mortar for their nests, but the first half of May was very dry here in West Michigan. Overnight last Wednesday, though, we got a thunderstorm. Two days later, I peeked out at the deck. There was a complete nest! She’d even found some green—a little cluster of ground-ivy leaves—for decoration. And there she was, tail feathers sticking up and out, like a flag to say she was home.

The American robin is not an uncommon bird; there are more of them in the U.S. than there are humans. But the one nesting on our deck? She’s a rare bird—one of one.

She is our new neighbor. We’re trying to be good neighbors.

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I texted my friend Husain Alhabib in Bahrain the other day. Iran is one of its nearest neighbors, just across the water, fewer than 200 miles away.

“No tourists,” he said, which means no income. Yet he insisted he and his family were fine. Last week he drove to Mecca to pray; it’s about 14 hours from home, west-southwest across the Arabian Peninsula, if you’re not driving too fast. Husain told me he remembered me in his prayers while in the holy city. At first, I thought this touching but weird. After all, he is the one who is living near a warzone—and then I realized that we are all living in warzones of different kinds, and a good neighbor recognizes that and feels no need to rank.

Husain went to Mecca because “I felt my soul thirsting for its Creator,” he told me. “In the midst of the painful events and difficult circumstances our region is going through, my heart could not bear anything except to go to the House of God—to pour out its burdens, to find stillness, and to draw strength from Him.” When he put on the ihram garments—the two seamless white pieces of cloth one wears in Mecca—they reminded him that, before God, there is “no title, no rank, no difference between one person and another. A king and a beggar stand before God in the same cloth. The ihram reminds you that yo ucame into this world with nothing, and you will return to Him with nothing—except what lives in your heart.”

Husain in Mecca last week

One ritual performed by pilgrims in Mecca is a walk between a hill called Safa and a hill called Marwa. It’s not a long walk—about a third of a mile—but the full ritual, called Sa’i, requires seven trips along the route. Sa’i commemorates Hagar’s search for water for young Ishmael—and on this walk, consolation comes from across the generations. “With every step I took, I felt I was not alone in my struggles,” Husain said. “God did not abandon her, and He will not abandon me.”

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Linda Macktaby, the Lebanese pastor I wrote about a couple of years ago, messaged me a couple of days ago to report that things continue to deteriorate in Lebanon. The ceasefire exists in rhetoric only; Hezbollah continues to deploy drones to Israel, and the Israeli military continues to bombard communities Lebanon. “They’re attacking Beirut from time to time,” Linda told me.

Linda sent me this photo of refugees’ tents in Beirut, taken on one of her sandwich-distribution excursions

Hundreds of thousands of refugees occupy encampments scattered across the Beirut area. Almost every day, Linda and her friends make hundreds of sandwiches to distribute to the many who have no kitchens. Nothing fancy—cold cuts, sliced cucumber, some greens, some cheese. “it’s not enough, but I’m doing as much as I can,” she said. She loves her neighbors.

That’s Linda on the left, with part of her sandwich-making crew

“We need to keep praying,” Linda told me. Prayers don’t feel like enough, but what else can we do? “We need peace. It’s been too long now. People are drained. Things are so hard. Very difficult.”

(If you would like to join me in buying some sandwiches for the refugees in Beirut, you can make a donation here, through Ponds Reformed Church in New Jersey. Any amount, no matter how small, is received with gratitude. The fund was originally set up to help reconstruction of a village in Lebanon’s south; right now any money donated is being sent to Linda to support her immediate relief work.)

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The community garden is open for the season now, and on Tuesday, I was out in the drizzle planting potatoes.

Dyanna, who lives a few houses down from us, came by my plot to say that she had some extra straw for mulch. Did I want some? Yes, please.

Roger has his fence up in the plot next to mine, and he told me to use his hose to water whenever I like.

The twine that the organizing committee uses to demarcate the plots is mostly still up. It will go slack and probably disappear over the weeks and months to come. The land and the birds and the butterflies and the worms and the beetles don’t care about our lines or our categories.

I have been thinking a lot about that—how I declare something “mine,” what it means when we refer to someone else with a heavily loaded “them,” why it’s so hard to remain openhearted. I suppose it must have to do with vulnerability, or maybe perceived protection. Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend about how many of us cosset ourselves in fortresses of our own making, telling ourselves a story about safety or ownership or boundaries to rationalize selfish behavior.

Frankly, the robin’s presence on our deck is not that convenient. We’ve never been interested in outdoor carpeting, the nest doesn’t go with our aesthetic, and we weren’t looking for another housemate, however temporary. (Same goes for the groundhogs who have begun to treat our yard like a buffet.) But then I realized I might also think of her as a teacher for a season. She reminds me that “mine” might well be “ours.” She urges me with her steady presence to remember that we were made for community, challenging as relationship might be sometimes.

She’s our neighbor. We’re trying to be good neighbors.

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What I’m Reading: This stunning little vignette about a rare Sardinian pasta called filindeu—“the threads of God”... what a beautiful word. It comes with gorgeous images and video, and it does a wondrous job of contextualizing food in a place, a people, a very specific cultural history.

What I’m Growing: Most of our tulips are done, but the irises and peonies have arrived, the thyme is blossoming and the bok choy is coming up. The garden is the place that reminds me, more than any other, of what I can control and what I can’t.

What I’m Listening to: Unlike many evangelical kids who came of age in the 1990s, I didn’t listen to much contemporary Christian music. Even if we attended an evangelical church, my parents weren’t immersed in the culture, they weren’t strict at all about music, and the soundtrack in our house tended more toward Carole King and the Carpenters as well as Suzuki violin recordings and whatever happened to be on Y100, the Top 40 station in Miami. But some things managed to percolate through, in part because I went to a Christian high school. There was the chapel every year when there was a dramatic performance of Carman’s “The Champion,” DC Talk came to perform one year, and did you even know Jesus in the 1990s if you didn’t shout to the Lord or lift the Lord’s name on high?

I suppose I never really listened to the words all that carefully, though, because it wasn’t until this week that I really understood how liberating the lyrics of that Avalon classic “Testify to Love” are. It was re-released, this time sung by Ty Herndon, Michael Passons, and my friend Melissa Greene. Michael and Melissa were both members of Avalon, and Michael was forced out of the group in 2003 for being gay.

Melissa’s brief account of the meaning of the song’s re-release is worth a read.

TESTIFY TO LOVE

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The world can feel so overwhelming right now. Not one of us can fix it all. But every one of us can do some small thing, whether it’s making a donation or telling someone we remember them or cooking a meal or planting some milkweed or sending a card or calling a legislator or saying a prayer or doing a volunteer shift or listening to someone who needs to be heard.

Every one of us can do some small thing today, both to remind ourselves of love and to embody love to someone else.

If you need some gentle, thoughtful inspiration, you might consider listening to (or watching) Kate Bowler’s podcast conversation with former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. I found them both so encouraging.

“We don’t love things in general,” she says.

What—or whom—can you love specifically right now?

“Let the self rise up and be held by God with truthfulness,” he says.

What do you need to tell God right now—what do you need to let God hold right now—that is true?

Grace abounds. Go out into the world, dear ones, to be loved and to love.

Yours,
Jeff