Last week BCP hosted our first short term missions team. They were a great group of students from one of our partner churches, StoneBridge Presbyterian Church. This church does such a great job of loving us and caring for us that it was no surprise to us that these students came to Brooklyn ready to work.

One of the projects they worked on was painting an iron fence that stretched along the front of an armory in Park Slope that now is home to a women's homeless shelter. There is one word that describes this project: tedious. Scraping the loose paint off a fence in 90 degree heat, and then putting another coat of paint in all the hard to reach places of a fence line may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of ministry, at least it doesn't for me. I like ministry activities that offer a little better return on our work than helpful suggestions from passer's by about the best way to tackle such a task.But the more I watched this team faithfully go about their work the more I realized they were doing just what we wanted them to do, they were loving our neighbors.

In Mark 10, when Jesus tells us that the second greatest commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves, he's calling us to paint some fences. In other words, he's calling us to the tedious jobs that take time, that offer very little in terms of reward or notoriety. Because it would be one thing if Jesus just told us to love our neighbors, but he tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves. And we are all very concerned with the details in our own lives. Therefore to love our neighbors means to pay attention to details, to be willing to do stuff for them that is tedious and mundane, and as the students of StoneBridge taught me last week to do it joyfully.

I'm grateful that this group did such a great job of loving our neighbors in such a tangible, specific way. And I'm glad that they pictured for us the way God loves us. It turns out God is more concerned about the fence that needs painting and all the other mundane details of our own lives (and our neighbors' lives) than we often think.