Home Owners Association

I went to my first homeowners association meeting last night. It was quite an experience. I live in a development in Covington Washington that has close to 1000 houses in the development. I had never been to a meeting before, but because there has been an uptick in graffiti and gang activity in our development, I wanted to go and speak and listen to whats been going on in our neighborhood.

There must have been about 30 or so people in this meeting. There is a board of 9 that run the association. The guest speaker for the night was the Chief of Police. He spent some time talking about crime, and budgets and the like. He talked about efforts by our police to effectively police our community and the limits of what they could do.

Then, it got real interesting. The board opened it up for people to speak, and I said my piece, which was basically that if we wanted our neighborhood to be nicer, we need to enforce the standards for yard cleanliness and get people to clean up graffiti as soon as possible and the like. I asked the board president what we could do as homeowners to help, and then it started.

The people at this meeting began to verbally attack the board president. People started to interrupt each other, raise their voices, walk out, yell. It was crazy! The president got defensive, the people got irate and nothing got accomplished. Nothing. Its no wonder our development is in the state it is.

Civility is a lost art. People no longer can share an opposing idea without raising their voice, attacking, or getting overly emotional about the whole thing. I understand that when there is a shooting on your street that it raises concerns about your safety, but if you can't even talk about it with some civility there is no way you can fix nothing.

The bible says in James chapter 3 that If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man. Relationships hinge on our ability to speak to people in a way that doesn't create animosity or contempt. We need to be people that watch what we say and how we say. We have an opportunity to be a blessing to people, even those with whom we oppose, and must remember to speak in a way that we are never at fault.

Watch what you say and how you say it. You'll notice you're life is a bit easier.

Blessings
matt