Distressing news from my own neighborhood. Prayer requests indeed. Neighbors whose lives are marked with pocks of sin-disease, festering, grotesque from long stewing in sinful wretchedness. When the Truth is rejected… oh if only we could impress the deathfulness of sin on those who dabble in it! There is only one outcome for the life and lifestyle of rebellion against God: Death! It reeks while living. It chokes. It gags all those around it.

And those of my neighbors who consider themselves better than the worst elements around them, yet themselves living in rebellion and rejection of the only Truth which can give them life too, live in self-made and self-perpetuating isolation from their neighbors. Living their death-lives as Isles of Pathos: Islands of Suffering and Tragedy.

This came to me as I considered the awful news about one of my neighbors. My community, the cluster of homes I have lived in for the past 16 years, has always been a mission field, a prayer concern. We have brought in evangelists in the form of Bible club teachers, year after year. We have seen God use godly neighbors, my co-laborers in ministry, in one case week after week teaching the Word of God to children, for several years; in another mentoring boys; in yet another continuing that discipling work in the lives of girls in the neighborhood, mentoring, modeling and teaching the truths of God to them for several years. We have agonized as we have seen the demise of those very works, the destructive lifestyles embraced by one or more of the children, in spite of the good things poured into their lives over spans of years.

Among my neighbors there are a few Followers of Jesus but many more who don’t know him, even after true and faithful witness and lifestyle evidence as they have interacted with and watched the godly lives of those of us who do follow Jesus.

Sin always spirals downward, generation after generation. You can see the deepening of sin’s awful effects, right before your eyes, as children learn from their parents how to live, or in these cases, how not to live in the world. We feel helpless. Is it any wonder that we pray for an outpouring of God’s Spirit?

But first, the people of God must be the ones to come into “judgment” before God. Judgment must always begin at the house of God, the family of God, the blood-bought children of God, who call ourselves by his name. We are the ones who must humble ourselves before him, turning away from and repenting of sin in our own lives, and instead living according to the clear teachings of the Word of God. Then, and only then, will God hear and answer prayer! Then he can and will, based on historic and biblical evidence, pour out his Spirit in conviction and power to save the lost, the spiritually dead, the death-living neighbors in our neighborhoods.

Then and only then can our neighborhood Isles of Pathos be bridged and become Archipelagos of Peace.

Pray for my neighborhood! Pray for your neighborhood! We are the Light in our neighbors’ darkness. We are the Salt which holds back the decay of sin-death. We must beseech the Lord of the Harvest for ways we can be the Laborers he needs in his fields!

Not only is there an eternity awaiting, there is the living today. Will my friend’s children, or any of my neighbors’ children, be harmed in any way by the death-living of their and my other neighbors whose lives reek of sin-death? God lead us in praying. God enter into our Pathos. God make us Bridge builders of Peace, through the Gospel of Peace, by the power of the Prince of Peace. May those of us in our neighborhoods who call ourselves by the Name of God, join together for the highest purpose, the purposes of God.

May all that needs to be broken down in our lives, be so. May all that needs to be built up in our lives, as the blood-bought people of God, be built up. May the world around us, at our doorsteps, see Jesus in us. May the Spirit of the living and only God pour out through our daily lives.

May, by God’s power and grace, those Isles of Pathos around us in our neighborhoods be bridged with the Gospel of Jesus, and become Archipelagos of Peace.

Jacque