{"id":50,"date":"2012-09-27T04:10:33","date_gmt":"2012-09-27T04:10:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/keepingthefaith\/?p=50"},"modified":"2012-08-30T19:14:00","modified_gmt":"2012-08-30T19:14:00","slug":"dont-define-your-neighbor-love-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/keepingthefaith\/2012\/09\/dont-define-your-neighbor-love-them.html","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Define Your Neighbor…Love Them"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A religious leader came to Jesus with a question. \u201cIf loving God and loving my neighbor is the totality of religious and spiritual requirement, then tell me Jesus, who is my neighbor?\u201d Jesus answered with a parable.\u00a0Jesus\u2019 response is his most well known story: The Good Samaritan. It turns up everywhere in our culture, even in places where people do not know what a Samaritan is or that it was Jesus who first told the story.\u00a0With such familiarity, we typically think of the Good Samaritan as a parable about being a good neighbor. That is not Jesus\u2019 point at all. Jesus does not even attempt to define the word \u201cneighbor,\u201d though that is what the religious questioner wanted.\u00a0Jesus takes another tact altogether. He defines instead what it means to \u201clove your neighbor.\u201d It is a love that involves itself in unexpected, revolutionary, boundary-breaking ways. Of course, the only way to explain such a love is with a story.<\/p>\n

Paul Rusesabagina is the former hotel manager who inspired the movie Hotel Rwanda<\/em>. Beginning in April 1994, over the course of a hundred days, an estimated one million Rwandans were killed after extremists in the majority Hutu population turned on the Tutsi minority.\u00a0Fifteen percent of the population was annihilated. For perspective, that would be the percentage equivalent of a genocide wiping out forty-six million Americans, the total combined population of the greater Southeastern United States:Alabama,Georgia,Florida,Mississippi,South Carolina and Tennessee\u2013 every human being living in those states, gone in three months.\u00a0Hotel Rwanda<\/em> focuses on the seventy-six days in which Mr. Rusesabagina transformed the luxury hotel over which he was responsible, into a refuge for the terrified.<\/p>\n

On the first day of violence, twenty-six people came to Paul\u2019s home for shelter. They knew he was a person of influence with high connections and that he could help them. That is why they came. But they also knew he was a person of compassion.\u00a0Paul had grown up in the Seventh Day Adventist Church and studied theology before becoming a hotel manager. His father had also taught him to always do what is right, no matter the consequences.\u00a0His father would say to him, \u201cIf two brothers are fighting, and you are called upon to separate them, you shouldn\u2019t look at those guys, one on your right hand side, or on the left hand side\u2026You only have to look up and see the truth, and only the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

That truth became a shining light of compassion, when at the end of those three months of killings Paul Rusesabagina had sheltered and saved 1,268 people in his hotel. They all survived on the ingenuity and creativity of an ordinary hospitality worker.\u00a0Somehow Paul kept corn and beans in the kitchen, rationed the water in the pool for drinking when militia cut the pipes, who took all the room numbers off the doors and burned the registration records, so the roving bands of machete-welding killers would not know the identities of those under his protection.\u00a0At one point, Paul and his family were given the opportunity to leave Rwanda. He packed his bags to depart. It was then the residents of his hotel came to him and begged him to stay.<\/p>\n

\u201cPaul,\u201d they said, \u201cwe know you are going to be leaving this place tomorrow. But please, if you are really leaving, tell us, because we will go to the roof of the hotel and jump. A better death would be to jump and die immediately than to be tortured.\u201d\u00a0Paul said, \u201cBy that afternoon I had made the toughest decision of my life. I said to myself, ‘Listen, Paul, if you leave, and those people are killed, you will never be a free man. You will be a prisoner of your own conscience.’ I then decided to remain behind.”\u00a0He further explained his actions this way: \u201cIf I am going to die, then I will die helping my neighbor.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A religious leader came to Jesus with a question. \u201cIf loving God and loving my neighbor is the totality of religious and spiritual requirement, then tell me Jesus, who is my neighbor?\u201d Jesus answered with a parable.\u00a0Jesus\u2019 response is his most well known story: The Good Samaritan. It turns up everywhere in our culture, even…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":441,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,10],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-love","category-service","tag-ronnie-mcbrayer"],"yoast_head":"\nDon't Define Your Neighbor...Love Them - Keeping The Faith<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/keepingthefaith\/2012\/09\/dont-define-your-neighbor-love-them.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Don't Define Your Neighbor...Love Them - Keeping The Faith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A religious leader came to Jesus with a question. \u201cIf loving God and loving my neighbor is the totality of religious and spiritual requirement, then tell me Jesus, who is my neighbor?\u201d Jesus answered with a parable.\u00a0Jesus\u2019 response is his most well known story: The Good Samaritan. 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