Welcome to the place where we keep our porch lights on.
Who we are We are ten women in one place with multiple perspectives, life experiences and ways of going about things. Those differences are openly displayed, not stuffed into the hall closet. We seek to present a colorful, comforting neighborhood where you don’t have join a club of like-mindedness in order to find a place of acceptance and welcome. Neighborlies has not been built to construct a modern-day Mayberry where behind every click a shiny Stepford wife will appear. We are the small town where faces become familiar, the porch lights of our hearts illuminate the words we share and one can breathe in deeply air that hasn't been polluted by pretension. If you spend time reading an issue of Neighborlies in your robe and slippers, you can be sure you're in great company, for surely we each will have typed out our words wearing the same. Come as you are, and you will find we have too.
If you're a twenty-something learning as you go or a fifty-something still learning from what you now know... If you have birthed, adopted or cried over the seemingly unanswered prayers for a child... If you have worked to keep a spark in your marriage or have seen the whole thing go up in flames... If you have to Google how to boil an egg or enjoy making deviled eggs blindfolded with one hand... If you thrive in the middle of a crowd or consider solitude the best company... If you love God, but are tired of glossy and cliché conversation about Him... ...You will find you fit right in among the women of Neighborlies.
How it all began Once upon a time not too long ago, there was a woman who loved to write but did not want to write alone. Even in the whirlwind of her life that involved five small children at her feet from sun up ‘til sun down, God whispered a dream in her ear, and with it, the names of women from all points of her past and present life. The lives of these women were vastly different, yet were uniformly punctuated with authenticity, good humor and uncompromising dedication to living out the Divine call to “Love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind” and also the one that says to “love your neighbor as yourself”. Not coincidentally, they all happened to have a way with the written word. With the escalating noise that comes on cue whenever a mother picks up a phone, she made the calls, set forth the vision in interrupted sentences and ended up with a bevy of women whose enthusiastic “I’m in” responses alighted the Divinely-inspired dream and propelled them all into action.
Our Neighborhood We choose to call what we are building a “Neighborhood”. Why? Because we long for a place that harkens to a simpler time where those who lived in the same town took time to chat about last night’s dinner over fences, pop through back doors while witnessing the messy house and unruly children without a blink and would rush to meet a need (even if it was to run over a cup of sugar in their bathrobe). We think God was on to something when He told us to love our Neighbor as ourselves (wait. We have to love ourselves?). Life seems to work best when we follow that order and our writings will reflect that over-arching Truth.
