Things that you would think should be simple and straightforward in this country are not. It can take hours to get a bill paid, road rules just don't apply, and you cannot expect common sense to be the rule of thumb. Usually things are the opposite of what you'd think they'd be. I don't know a missionary here who has not been frustrated by this a time or two...or ten...or a hundred...you get my drift.
On Thanksgiving Day, Jessie and I spent hours out at the new land trying to get it accurately measured and transfer the deed. Would you believe it's still not completely done? I hope to finalize things with the lawyer later today and have a deed in my hand soon. In the meantime, I have my new neighbors to deal with. It seems that everyone is very kind and wants to have a friendly relationship, minus two sisters, Magdalena and Gloria, who jointly control the 200+ foot driveway with me. Magdalena doesn't even live on her property and never uses the driveway; Gloria lives up by the street and uses about 10 feet of it. However, in an effort to make my life difficult, they have constructed a fence right smack dab down the middle of the entire driveway.
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| On left: from the main road. On right: from the bottom of the property looking up |
They know that this is illegal, and they will eventually have to take it down. They also know that it take an effort on my part to force them to do so. I wish I could tell you that my first response was a godly one, but it wasn't. I really wanted to tear up the fence myself and throw it in Gloria's back yard with a note: "This is what I think of your fence!" Instead, I chose to pretend I didn't even see it and walked on through to my property to show it off to my mom who was visiting at the time. Later I realized that it would be far better to call the authorities and let them deal with it and to kill the neighbors with kindness in the meantime. At what point in your adult life as a Christian does the godly response pop into your head first? My mom and my CTEN peeps say never.
At any rate, the Christian response did eventually occur to me, but I have had no time to respond at all yet, and it's been a week. This has turned out to be a good thing, I think. Last night, God brought this phrase to my attention when I was perusing an article someone posted on facebook. Ps. 147:14 "He makes peace in your borders..." More than anything, my neighbors need the Lord and ripping up their fence is probably not going to do much to draw them to Christ. I'm also thinking that maybe I shouldn't call the local authorities at this point either. In lieu of that, I'm going to take some time to pray about it and ask the One who is really in charge to bring peace to my borders. He is the only one who really can. And quite honestly, it's exhausting trying to solve all your own problems! Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. So tomorrow my plan is just to go on about my business as usual. After the food delivery, I will take some of the widows with me and deliver some extra food to Gloria and just see what God does. I know I can count on you all the help me pray about it, and I'll let you know how God answers!
