September 10 - Last Sunday's second reading from Romans tells us:

 "You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law."

How timely, considering that one of the biggest news stories in Toledo this week has a lot to do with neighbors.

On Sunday, Aaron and Jackie Frisch and their family in West Toledo got a door knock around 9:30 am from Ty Pennington and an entourage from the poplular ABC television show, Extreme Makeover Home Edition. If you haven't seen this tv show, families with hardships and heartships are nominated to have their house torn down to receive a completely furnished new home, which is built in one week. All of the work done on the project is done by over 1000 skilled and unskilled volunteers, and the house is being built by Buckeye Builders, co-owned by Tim Schlacter and Mike White, two grads of St. Francis High School.

Jackie and Aaron have adopted 8 children, all boys from Haiti, and when combined with their three biological sons, it's a family of 13 living under one roof. Jackie has some serious health problems, and in interviews this week,she said she won't to have to worry anymore about her home for her firefighter/paramedic husband and her children.

Their next door neighbors, inspired by the Frisch family have a large family of their own, with several of their children adopted. The families are very close and eat dinner together several times a week.

As a volunteer member of the media team this week for this project, I've had the chance to be onsite and witness this amazing project. The orchestration of the house demolition and the excavation, followed by the "big dig" to create the hole that would, in a matter of hours become the basement for this new five bedroom house was pretty impressive.. All the construction workers are volunteers, and watching the hundreds of blue shirts onsite yesterday was fun - everyone has a job and the speed at which they are working tells you that these guys mean business.

All the neighbors that surround this house have given up their lawns, backyards and probably some sleep since the crews work 24 hours a day so that the Frisch's can have a new cleaner, larger, safer house. I heard a story earlier this week that the neighbors are offered a hotel room for the week and noone has taken the offer. All the houses with front lawns that have now essentially become parking lots for tents, trailers, trucks and construction equipment will get new landscaping. Tuesday evening one house had a vegetable garden in the front yard--by Wednesday afternoon sod was laid and a new pathway to a food tent was created. Poof! Garden gone.

It's all very exciting, this Extreme Makeover Home Edition in Toledo and I keep thinking back to a comment that a producer from the show made last week at a rally with the students from St. Francis High School. As the story was told to me, he said you don't need a tv show like Extreme Makeover to do what they do. You can do it yourselves. You can gather people to help out a neighbor in need. A perfect example of this is the story of the Brian Clark family in South Toledo.  The Clarks were considered for the Extreme Makeover tv show, they even made a list of 26 families in Ohio under consideration. 

Read their story here, as reported by Angie Kessler online for the Catholic Chronicle, our diocesan newspaper.

And after you read the story, maybe think about how you can be a better neighbor.

Sally