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In September, I wrote in this space about the yard signs that were about to go up across Morgantown. I ended that column with three words of advice. Go introduce yourself.
The election is over. The signs have come down. I owe you a report on whether I took my own advice.
I did. Here is what happened.
I put up yard signs this fall. I said so in September, and I will say it again here. One of those signs was for a candidate who also happens to be my neighbor. So before my next sign went up, I walked over to talk with him.
I wanted him to hear it from me first. Soon there would be another sign in my yard, this one for a candidate from the other party. I did not want it to come as a surprise. I told him plainly that I would be voting for both of them.
Here was a man with his own name on the ballot. He had every reason to want my undivided loyalty. Instead, he took real pride that his sign would share a yard with one from the other party. That, he told me, is exactly what we need. People working together across party lines to get things done for the folks who live on streets like ours.
It was a short conversation. It was also one of the more important ones I had this fall.
I did not go over there to explain my politics or to win anybody over. I went because I could picture how that second sign might look from his front porch. It might read like a change of heart. It might even read like a betrayal. A sign cannot explain itself. A neighbor can.
That is the trouble with yard signs. They are fine things. They are part of how a free people take part in public life, and I will put them up again. But a sign says only one thing about the person who planted it. Our neighbors are always more than one thing. The person behind the sign might be the nurse working the night shift or the one who brought your trash can up from the curb when you were out of town. We forget that easily in October.
Now it is November. The votes have been counted. Some of us are relieved and some of us are grieving. That is true on almost every street in this town. The signs have come down, but the neighbors are not going anywhere. The same people will be shoveling the same sidewalks this winter. We will pass each other in the grocery store and sit together in the stands at Milan Puskar Stadium and Hope Coliseum. Our children will share the same classrooms.
When Jesus was asked which commandment mattered most, he answered with two. Love God with everything you have. Love your neighbor as yourself. He did not add an exception for the neighbor who votes the other way.
When someone pressed him to say exactly who counts as a neighbor, he told a story about a Samaritan. That was a man from the very group his listeners had been raised to distrust. In the story, the neighbor turns out to be the one who stopped and helped.
I grew up in McDowell County. It is a place where people argue about plenty and still show up when a family is in trouble. Folks who would never mark the same ballot will carry a casserole to the same porch. That is not a small thing. It may be the very thing that holds a community together when so much else is pulling it apart.
So here is my invitation for this season after the election.
If your candidate won, be gentle. Someone on your street is disappointed and maybe afraid. If your candidate lost, do not pull the shades. Your neighbor is still your neighbor, and you may need each other long before the next election comes around.
Either way, take the first step. Walk over and say hello. Talk about the Mountaineers or the price of a turkey.
Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away. Many of us will sit at tables with people who marked their ballots differently than we did. Before you pass the stuffing, remember that the sign in the yard was never the whole person. It was only ever a sign.
The signs have come down. The neighbors are still here.
Go introduce yourself again.
Rev. Larry Buckland serves Suncrest United Methodist Church of Morgantown. He is ordained in The United Methodist Church and is writing as part of the Morgantown Faith Leaders Network