Trouble with my neighbour, part three

I don’t get on with my neighbour. My neighbour does not get on with me. Life goes on.

Most of the time it does not matter. When I am not too busy or too stressed, it’s fine. When I don’t suddenly have a lot of laundry to do because I have just come back from holiday, or my child is ill, it’s fine. When the plumbing in our flat works, it’s fine. But how often am I not busy or not stressed? Not often.

And when the plumbing did go wrong and I needed to liaise with my neighbour for access to the outside drain in his back garden, we reached breaking point. I sent a text pointing out a blockage. I received a reply aggressively blaming me for this. I stopped praying for a solution and took action, passing the text to my landlord so that he could do the liaising.

I also asked an intermediary at church who knows the landlord to talk to my neighbour. I do not know the exact details of the conversation, but afterwards, the intermediary assured me that if we felt pushed out by our neighbour, our landlord would take steps to move him on. So much for a gentle and loving solution!

Time passed as we stewed over this unhappy situation. More people prayed about it, even when we gave up.

God’s blessings can come in disguise. The summer holidays came and we were met with a new challenge – a challenge which we shared with our neighbour…

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This is an extract from an article that was published in the November 2018 edition of  Reform

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