Friends and neighbors...

LC and her husband are in the middle of a pretty bad situation with their downstairs neighbor at their condo and I feel awful for them. I think I feel it closely because what they are experiencing is actually one of my greatest fears.

Condos are different from apartments in the fact that you often own your condo (at least everything inside the walls of the condo!). It’s not a rental where if you hate your neighbor or decide the view is terrible you can convince yourself to suffer through the problem since your lease only lasts a year and at the end of that year you can go somewhere else.

Condos are different from single family homes in the fact that if you hate your neighbors you simply can’t get away from them. In a single family home you can manage to avoid your neighbors because you have a buffer zone of some sort in between you and them. In a condo, you often share a doorway or your front doors are directly next to one another and your odds of bumping into one another and being in close proximity of one another is far greater at all times.

A lesson I have learned from living in a condo for 9 years (the anniversary of my move-in date is tomorrow—what a timely post!) is that whether you are “friends” with your neighbors or not really doesn’t matter (I have been best friends with some neighbors over the years and some I simply say hello to and smile at, they don’t even remember my name, I think) what matters is:

1. You are at least cordial to another (what if I had an emergency and I started screaming for help? I’d hope that my next door neighbor might hear me and think, “Oh no, the nice lady next door is screaming, I better go make sure she is OK.” And not “That rude woman that never smiles at me is screaming, who cares?”) .

2. You are at all times respectful of one another. Do you allow your friends to park in their assigned parking spot? That is unacceptable. Are you having a party and not considering the fact that someone below you might be trying to sleep? You are not thinking of others. Come on now, you were raised better than that.

OK, now LC and DJ are in a scenario where numbers 1 and 2 above are not happening, and in fact, things much worse are going down. It has escalated to a point where they are fearful for their physical safety and they are going to move.

That makes me so mad. On the one hand, I completely understand why. Like I said, their scenario is a fear of mine and if I were in their situation I would surely think about moving away from the problem. What makes me furious is the fact that there are people in this world that actually have the power (either because they are mean, rude, mentally ill, dangerous, etc) to affect other people’s lives in that way. I mean, this is not a situation where they have to go sit on a different park bench because they are sitting next to a person who may not be all there. This is a situation where they have to pick up their whole lives, sell their home, and literally move away from a place they otherwise love.

Everyone, let’s please pray today that God uses this difficult and stressful situation as an opportunity for LC and DJ to find an even better condo than their current one. Lord, you can take any situation and turn it to good. We ask you to do this here. Lord, hear our prayer.