This weekend I met two of my neighbors, I discovered that one of them runs a business on the weekends selling the best tamales you’ll ever eat, and I made $355. Successful weekend? I think so.
So how’d I do it? My wife and I held a garage sale. That’s right, we held a garage sale! Even though I only intended it to be a way of getting rid of our unneeded junk (and we had a lot of junk), it turned out to be an incredible relationship building tool with our neighbors!
Through our garage sale, we were able to give our next-door neighbor, Virginia, a television and VCR player for her preschool class that she teaches. It turns out she’d been looking for one for a while, and we just happened to be getting rid of ours that we no longer needed. Through this, we not only gave her a TV and VCR, but we also struck up a friendship.
We also met Jose, the tamale guy. His 12-year-old son came up to me during the garage sale and asked if I’d be interested in trying one of their home-made tamales. Being a food junkie, naturally I jumped all over the opportunity. The tamale was nothing short of heaven wrapped up into a small, bite-sized snack!
However, in addition to eating pure bliss disguised as a tamale, I also got to meet Jose. It turns out that Jose lives just a few houses down from us and sells his tamales ever Saturday to garage-salers, construction workers, and others in and around our neighborhood. I don’t know Jose very well yet, but I look forward to getting to know him (and his tamales) better in the future.
Of course, I say all of this not to make you salivate over heavenly tamales or brag about how I gave away a VCR, but simply to illustrate how simple it is to build relationships with your neighbors. Even though I did a poor job of planning intentional ways of reaching out to our neighbors through our garage sale, God was still gracious enough to open up the lines of communication with our neighbors.
I believe that garage sales, If done with more intentionality than what I did, can be an incredible way to meet and build relationships with your neighbors. Perhaps you could host a neighborhood-wide garage sale. Odds are that if you have stuff you want to get rid of, so do others in your neighborhood.
So what do you think? Has anyone ever used a garage sale as a way to build relationships with others in your neighborhood? If so, tell me about it in a comment below!
