We live in an area of Portsmouth which has quite a close-nit community - lots of people know each other and hang out together and I think that has both positive and negative effects on the community as a whole. The other day a neighbour of ours asked to borrow something of ours and we naturally said yes but when it was returned to us we noticed that it was completely broken.
Typical - you try and do a nice thing, yet something like this happens and it plops you into a sticky predicament. The mentality of a lot of people in Portsmouth would be to handle this situation by going round and starting an argument about it - probably demanding some money for a replacement. Now I don't believe that is the way God would handle the situation where He here with me but at the same time I don't think that God calls Christians to simply be a walk-over and ignore things that matter to us. Yet the passage where Jesus tells us to 'turn the other cheek' does also make me wonder where the right path lies (although that same passage also says to not refuse people who want to borrow from you!)
It is a common battle I find myself in - I want to stand up for God and be different in my thinking and in my actions - but yet it seems difficult to find the narrow path of what is going to demonstrate that Christians are not afraid to stand up and talk about things but at the same time talk about things in a productive way that enhances a relationship rather than destroy it.
So I did go back round to have a chat - I figured I'd take the approach of 'just wondered if you had noticed that it doesn't work any more and if you knew what had happened to it'. Sadly they weren't in - so i'll have to go back another time. At the end of the day, our relationships with our neighbours is more important than the broken utensil and so I won't demand any money off of them. But I still find it hard to talk about things like this without coming off as being confrontational and shirty.
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