"To be a realist, you must believe in miracles." – David Ben-Gurion.

One Sunday morning, as my wife Yvonne and I sat in the sun-lit sanctuary of her home church (Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida), she turned to me and whispered, "I think God just spoke to me. Things will get tough, but we’re to stick together. He’s preparing us for a role."

At that time (1978) I was a library manager; Yvonne a bank secretary. We lived modestly but adequately. But after that "message" our world turned upside down. Time after time, we experienced things we thought only happened to others. Just a few were sexual harassment; firings for pregnancy and for illness; a layoff that cost us our home, savings, and health insurance; pesticide poisoning, and toxic mold that sickened us for years and took nearly all our possessions.

The peak came when for nearly six years, beginning in 1993, we and our two young children lived in a tent, much like Abraham – except ours had wheels for towing, a tiny refrigerator, a heater, a folding stove, and a small sink.

We weren’t alone: just in my field (by then aerospace/defense), between one and two million families lost their jobs and homes. Indeed, we were fortunate. Thanks to our tent trailer our "home" never became a bridge, a car, the street, or a shelter – as it did for many we met.

Those six homeless years made us the realists David Ben-Gurion described. We worked hard, but the obstacles proved great; the barriers high. We had to believe in miracles, and experience them.

But we chose to make an adventure of the hard times, and saw God’s hand in them. Walking where others walked gave us a heart for good, hardworking people in difficult circumstances. It took away our stereotypes. It let us feel the passion in the preaching on human needs by Jesus, the prophets, and the disciples. And it brought to life the thousands of Biblical passages that exhort us to love and help our neighbors.

During that "learning time" I spent one full month in bed with a severely torn leg muscle. "Stir crazy," I leafed through my Bible, listing texts about "loving our neighbors." That first quick look found 600 verses, which later, with help from a good concordance, swelled to over 3,000. This book is based on them.

These verses come from every book in the Bible. Some describe kinds of "neighbors," like family, the poor, sick, orphans, immigrants, widows, prisoners, politicians, or enemies. Others spotlight those neighbors’ most pressing needs or describe how God’s people tried – or neglected - to love them.

These Scriptures communicate the depth of God’s love for his children; an awareness of how deeply many of them are hurting, an understanding of how important it is to minister to their needs; and a realization of the responsibility he gives us all to fulfil that ministry.

God has created us all. He loves us all. He feels it when we hurt. Jesus taught that when we see hurting individuals around us, and don't help them, we don’t help him. God expects us to help as much as if Jesus himself was in need. Have any of us loved or given that much?

Through this study I realized how little I’d known about what "loving our neighbors" meant For me, it had been a "forgotten commandment." And society often replaces it with "me first."

It’s time to relearn what God means by "loving our neighbors!"

This Bible study attempts to teach that. It’s interwoven with my family’s and friends’ experiences. All are true. But I’ll tell you now: some sound impossible.

If you can, think of those stories as affirmation that God is indeed real. That the miracles we read about in the Bible can, and sometimes do, happen today. That when we quietly ask God to lead our lives, and mean it, he may do so in ways we could never have imagined and for which we would never have dared to dream, let alone ask!

I hope those stories will be as fresh as (but more helpful than!) the exhibit of one science fair student whose booth I saw in a tiny Western desert town. He reasoned that if talking affectionately to plants benefits them, harsh language should do just the opposite. So he titled his project "The Effects of Cussing on Plants." He planned to grow two potted flowers, "cussing" one daily, and compare their growth. He held my fascinated attention until his final panel, which read "The result of my experiment was that both plants died because I forgot to water them."

How is this book organized?

Most of the 3,000 verses fall naturally into topics, which form the chapters. Questions and answers bring out specific Biblical teachings. First-hand stories add interest and "fun." Quotes give flavor, provoke thought, and show how Christians and nonChristians alike have spoken up for "loving our neighbors."

Where names are changed for privacy’s sake, they’re enclosed in apostrophes the first time each is used (as in ‘Don’).

It was soon obvious that quoting all 3000+ verses was not practical. So as a rule I’ve quoted one or two verses on each quesion, then listed others you can read.

Except where noted, all verses are from the Living Bible (1992 Rainbow Study Bible edition), used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers. I like the way this translation’s clear paraphrasing expresses each thought in language we’d use today. For those of you who want to study all the Scripture references, I strongly recommend using one of the many good modern-language versions available. Ask your Christian bookstore for suggestions.

Are all of today’s "love your neighbors" issues discussed here? No. The Bible was written long ago. But its principles apply amazingly well today. And this book tries to lay a Biblical foundation for intelligently, caringly approaching all the issues that impact our "neighbors" now.

For example, race is actually a recent issue, which only came to the fore a few hundred years ago. In the Bible skin color wasn’t thought significant, though ancestry sometimes was (as with the Samaritans). The few Bible verses that mention race all focus on issues between Jews and non-Jews, not blacks vs whites. Even in Colossians 3: 11, "In this new life one’s nationality or race or education or social position is unimportant," most modern versions use other words than "race" (the NIV says "Greek or Jew").

Today, we need to meet issues like race with love. How we treat any person, regardless of color, sex, age, handicap, etc., is how we treat Jesus.

And some issues, like justice for the poor, keeping land affordable, and protecting land ownership, were actually emphasized more strongly in the Bible than they are today.

I’ve tried to write this book for readers of many faiths. Certainly, I have my own background. But I respect others, and have seen God’s Spirit working in many kinds of churches. So there is only one teaching I want to argue for here: that we all love and help our neighbors as God tells us to. I believe all churches can work together to do that, even while keeping their own distinctive teachings.

While I don’t expect most of this book’s readers to agree with of my views, I do pray that you’ll check its teachings by "searching the Scriptures" like the early Bereans (Acts 17: 11, New Living Translation). And I pray that God will make his Word "accomplish all I want it to and prosper everywhere I send it" (Isaiah 55: 11).

Most of all, I pray that as we live God’s love, our "neighbors" will see how good, how real, and how fulfilling that love is, and will want to experience it themselves.