My Excellent Neighbour.

I was asked to do a bit for the local paper.  Here's what I submitted.


It is perhaps a guilty pleasure of mine that I like the Bill and Ted films of the late eighties and early nineties. The films show a utopian view of a future society which is founded on Bill and Ted’s music, and where the underpinning mantra is “be excellent to each other.”

In Matthew’s gospel , chapter 22, after being told that we must love our God, Jesus told us to “love our neighbour as ourself.” These are the two most important commandments, which all the other laws hang on. These days, the person that is our neighbour may not live in the same street, town or country as ourselves. Through social media, our neighbours could be anywhere in the world, and may not share our faith or our ideas on how society should be run. Hard as it may sometimes seem, we are all neighbours, and we need to love each other.

If we want to make the world the best it can be, then we need to spend less time sharing gossip and rumours about our neighbours and instead, reach out to them with a love as great as the love we have for ourselves. So get out there, and whatever you do, be excellent to each other!