I was hit hard a few weekends ago with the conviction that I am thoroughly judgmental. It wasn’t a coincidence that I had spent the evening at the Des Moines Arts Festival: my convictions were doubtless catalyzed by the thousands of people that had surrounded me for the past three hours.

Throughout the evening, I just did what I normally do when in public—size up strangers in my mind as they pass by, writing abridged life stories to explain their every action that I disapprove of. The moment I walk out the front door, this little internal criticizer flickers to life and begins to simmer just beneath the surface, hidden from the sight of my always-vigilant sentry of a conscience. But as I waded through the sea of thousands of people that night, my criticizer must have gotten a bit careless due to the amount of work it had to do, because it broke the surface just long enough for my conscience to spot it and sound the alarm.

And the clarity came to me all at once as I realized this is a terrible habit to have. To reduce a human being from three beautiful and vivid dimensions down to one, dull and faded; to rewrite his biography to read like a coloring book instead of a complex character study that would make Dostoevsky look like Dr. Seuss—a terrible and poisonous habit.

Jesus told a story in Luke 11 about a demon who leaves a man, but decides to return after realizing it has nowhere else to go. Upon arriving, it finds the house clean and orderly—but vacant. So it brings seven other demons with it, and as Jesus says, “the final condition of that man is worse than the first.”

I didn’t understand the relevance of this parable until a few weeks ago. Now, I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of the subject matter, which is literal demonic possession. But this is a divine perception into the root problem behind habitual sin: the house may be in order, but it’s still empty! No matter how hard we try, we can never just stop doing or quit thinking something, and this is why so many of us give up after repeatedly failing.

No, the only way to overcome these habits is to deliberately push them out of our minds with something else to fill the void—something as good as the habit was bad. An eviction is nothing more than an idle threat if the landlord doesn’t change the locks and rent out to someone else.

And for me, with my demon of criticism, this means chasing away “Well, the choice of food in his shopping cart explains the need for a motorized scooter” with a picture of that person standing right next to me in eternity, in his glorified and perfect body, singing praises to our Creator with notes and scales that don’t exist in this world. It’s very difficult to have wrong thoughts about another person when you understand what they’re made for.

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Romans 13:8-10

Jesus gave the example of the Good Samaritan to the Jewish scholar to show that your neighbor meant anyone he was able to show love to. But just like the closed-minded Jew, I lack imagination in understanding who could be my neighbor.

To most Americans of our day, Jesus might have told a parable about the Good Iraqi, who helped a wounded soldier at cost to himself even though his brother had just the week before been killed by stray shrapnel from a round of American freedom-bombing. Just the sort of story that could get Jesus assassinated.

If He was telling the story to me, though—to someone who thought he had a pretty good grasp of what everyone means—it might go something like this:

Two young adults graduated from college and landed good entry-level jobs in their field of study. Finding themselves with more discretionary income than they knew how to spend, and resolving to plant their feet solidly in the middle class, they each bought a house. Now both of them were handy and decided to fix up the houses on their own.

The first went to remodel his bathroom and found that the previous owners had done a very poor job of painting in corners that were out of plain view. Cheap new tile had also been laid to cover up a mildew problem. In the coming weeks he found many other cases like this where the owners had covered up something in haste to make the house appear better than it was.

The second, meanwhile, finishing the basement, found that his house’s electrical wiring had been updated recently, and in doing so, the last owners had made it very easy for him to wire the basement into the main electrical system. In fact, behind every wall he tore down and inside every light fixture he removed, in every part of the house that had been updated, he found that they had taken great care to do everything even above and beyond the minimum requirements of the residential building code.

Now, I ask you: Which of the previous homeowners was a neighbor to the new homeowner?

“What’s mine is mine” – for now, yes, but it won’t always be that way. This is reason enough to respect all kinds of property.

Who then is my neighbor? Anyone who can be affected by my actions, even if I will never meet him or even know his name.