He lives right next door.
He lives right next door.
Not down the street or across town, but only a few yards away. His name is Brad Putnam. He is a United States Marine Corps veteran who is living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
For years, we barely spoke.
I had helped his daughters receive their veterans’ education benefits when I worked at the college, but outside of that, Brad and I were mostly neighbors in the most surface-level sense of the word. We would wave. We might exchange a quick hello. Then we would return to our homes, our families, and our separate lives.
I knew who he was, but I did not really know him.
Then came the diagnosis.
Now Brad rarely leaves the house. His speech has become difficult to understand, and his body is slowly giving out. The man who lives only a few yards from me is dying, and I cannot escape the question that keeps pressing against my heart:
Why did it take this for me to finally see him?
That question has been difficult for me to sit with.
God placed Brad right next door to me. I do not believe that was an accident. He was never meant to be background scenery in my life or simply the man who lived in the house beside mine. He was my neighbor. A husband. A father. A Marine. A man with a life full of experiences, pain, memories, regrets, love, and stories I had never taken the time to hear.
He was someone to love.
Yet for years, I was too busy, too distracted, or perhaps too comfortable with the distance between our houses to walk across the yard and truly know him.
That is painful to admit because I say I want to follow Jesus.
I say I want to be used by God. I pray for opportunities to serve people, encourage them, and make some kind of difference in their lives. But sometimes I think I am looking so far away for those opportunities that I miss the person God has placed directly in front of me.
Jesus never rushed past suffering.
He noticed people. He stopped. He sat with them. He touched those others avoided, and He entered their pain without needing to explain it away.
Too often, I imagine serving God as something significant or visible. I think about leadership, purpose, influence, and doing something that matters. But I am learning that obedience often looks much smaller and much more personal than that.
Sometimes it looks like knocking on a door.
Sometimes it looks like sitting in a chair beside a man whose words require patience to understand.
Sometimes it means allowing silence to remain in the room instead of rushing to fill it.
Since first feeling that conviction, I have walked across the yard twice.
Both times, I felt hesitation before I went. I did not know exactly what I was walking into. I did not know whether Brad would want to talk, whether I would understand him, or whether my being there would somehow make an already difficult situation more uncomfortable.
But I went.
I sat with Brad and his wife in their home. I asked simple questions, and I listened.
He shared things about his life, his struggles, and where he is right now. He spoke about what he has experienced and what it is like to live inside a body that is slowly taking away his independence.
The last time I went over, Brad cried.
His wife cried too.
Watching that happen affected me more deeply than I expected.
I do not believe they cried because I had said anything profound. I had no great speech. I had no wisdom that could change what they were facing. I could not make Brad’s body work again. I could not remove his wife’s fear or take away the pain of watching the person she loves slowly disappear in front of her.
I think they cried because I was there.
I think they cried because someone was willing to sit with them in a place most people would not know how to enter.
That realization broke something open in me.
There are places in life we naturally want to avoid because they remind us how powerless we are. Illness. Grief. Fear. Death. We stay away because we do not know what to say. We worry we will make things worse. We tell ourselves that someone else is probably closer to them or better equipped to help.
But perhaps people do not always need us to arrive equipped.
Maybe they just need us to arrive.
I spoke with Brad about God, but I did not speak as though I knew where he stood.
The truth is, I still do not know whether Brad is a Christian. I have not asked him.
I shared from my own vulnerability. I spoke about my fears, my questions, and what faith has meant to me in difficult seasons. I did not preach to him. I did not try to explain his illness or force the conversation somewhere it was not ready to go.
I did not say much.
Mostly, I listened.
Before I left, I told him I would pray for him.
But I did not pray with him in the room.
I have thought about that moment repeatedly.
Part of me wanted to ask if I could pray with him. I felt the words rising in me, but I became afraid. I worried that I might make him uncomfortable. I worried that my prayer would sound forced or inadequate. I worried about what it would feel like to pray out loud for a dying man while looking directly at him.
So I told him I would pray later.
And I have.
I have prayed for Brad hard every day.
I have prayed for peace. I have prayed for comfort. I have prayed for his wife and his daughters. I have prayed that God would make Himself known in that house. I have prayed for healing, even while knowing that healing may not come in the way any of us desperately want it to.
I have also prayed for courage.
His wife told me he may have six months to live.
Six months.
I have repeated those words in my mind more times than I can count. Six months is not a distant future. It is a small number of weeks, conversations, visits, and opportunities.
Maybe he has longer.
Maybe he does not.
None of us really know.
But hearing those words made the distance between our houses feel even smaller. It made the time feel heavier. It made every excuse I could make for not walking across the yard feel hollow.
The next time I go over, I want to take another step.
I do not want to assume what Brad believes. I want to ask him. I want to know what he thinks about God, what questions he carries, and what faith means to him, if anything, as he faces the end of his life.
And if he is comfortable with it, I want to ask whether I can pray with him.
That conversation scares me.
I am afraid I will not know what to say. I am afraid emotion will take over. I am afraid my words will feel too small for what he is facing.
But maybe I need to stop waiting until I feel brave enough.
Maybe courage is not the absence of fear. Maybe it is simply being willing to walk across the yard again, ask an honest question, and listen without trying to control the answer.
I cannot heal Brad.
I cannot stop ALS from taking more from him.
I cannot give him back the life he had before this disease entered it.
But God has not asked me to fix Brad.
He has asked me to love him.
Loving Brad means being honest enough to ask about what he believes and respectful enough to listen, whatever his answer may be. It means not turning his suffering into a project or treating him like someone I need to rescue.
It means seeing him as a person.
Maybe that is where I have gone wrong for much of my life. I have believed that in order to help someone, I need the perfect words, the right answer, or something meaningful to offer.
Brad is teaching me otherwise.
Maybe my presence is the offering.
Maybe listening is ministry.
Maybe sitting beside someone in their pain is more meaningful than trying to explain it.
Maybe an honest question is an act of love.
Maybe a trembling prayer is still a faithful prayer.
Maybe walking next door is an act of worship.
My own life is difficult right now. There are days when my thoughts are consumed by my own circumstances, by what has happened, what might happen next, and what I wish I could change.
But perhaps God is using Brad to pull my eyes away from myself.
Perhaps He is reminding me that even when I am hurting, I can still love someone.
Even when I feel weak, I can still show up.
Even when I do not understand my own life, I can still sit beside someone in theirs.
I wish I had walked across the yard sooner.
I wish I had known Brad before ALS became the reason I finally slowed down.
I wish I had asked about his life when his voice was stronger and his body could still carry him wherever he wanted to go.
I cannot change that now.
But Brad is still here.
And so am I.
There is still time to walk next door.
There is still time to listen.
There is still time to ask.
There is still time to pray.
There is still time for me to become the neighbor God called me to be.
Maybe there is someone near you whom God has been asking you to notice.
It could be someone you keep meaning to call. Someone you wave to but do not really know. Someone whose pain makes you uncomfortable because you do not know what to say. Maybe it is someone who lives across town.
Or perhaps, like Brad, they live only a few yards away.
Do not wait until tragedy forces you to see them.
Ask God to show you who is right next door, and then go.
Make the call.
Send the message.
Knock on the door.
Sit in the uncomfortable room.
Ask the honest question.
Listen without trying to fix everything.
Pray, if they are willing, even if your voice shakes.
You do not need perfect words. You do not need all the answers. You only need to be willing to love.
