One of the fascinating things about creation is that certain patterns repeat themselves. Whether you’re looking through a microscope or a telescope, many of the same designs appear again and again at different scales. Mathematics calls these fractals: patterns that repeat regardless of size.

I’ve always loved these glimpses into the architecture of reality. Every so often, a simple pattern emerges that explains far more than it ought to. It cuts through seemingly endless layers of complexity and reveal something fundamental. Businesses search for these kinds of principles because they make organizations healthier. Philosophers spend lifetimes looking for them because they reveal something true about the world itself.

The nature of a fractal is that it is almost always hidden in plain sight. We see it constantly. We simply don’t have the perspective to recognize what we’re looking at.

In Luke 10, Jesus is asked by an expert in the law, “Who is my neighbor?” As the son of a lawyer myself, I can appreciate the question. It’s an attempt to define the boundaries of responsibility. Who qualifies? Where does my obligation begin and end? Who am I technically responsible for?

I hear versions of that question all the time. Working alongside Kingdom leaders, it usually sounds more like, “We can’t be everything to everyone, so where can we reasonably expect to be the ones who show up?”

It’s a totally fair and practical question – we all butt up against our own capacity limitations.

But Jesus, as He so often does, doesn’t answer the question as it is asked. Instead, He tells the parable of the Good Samaritan and then asks a question of His own.

“Which of these three proved to be a neighbor?”

That isn’t the question He was asked.

The lawyer wanted Jesus to identify the object of his responsibility. Jesus responds by describing the character of the person who fulfills it.

The structure of the story makes that impossible to miss. The priest had the right title and beliefs. The Levite belonged to the right tribe. The Samaritan had neither. By every category the lawyer would have expected to matter, the Samaritan should have been disqualified. Yet he is the one Jesus holds up as the example.

Neighboring, it turns out, isn’t defined by identity, status, proximity, or even belonging to the “right” group. It is revealed through character expressed in action.

If neighboring is about the kind of person we become rather than the category of people we encounter, then the only thing that changes throughout our lives is the scope of its expression. The same posture that shapes the way we love a friend can shape the way we lead a family, build a business, shepherd a church, or serve a city. Influence expands, but character remains.

I’m beginning to believe more and more that this is our fractal hidden in plain sight.

The beautiful reality is that every one of us gets to live out this pattern. We begin life almost exclusively concerned with our own flourishing, and much of maturity is learning to become an agent of the flourishing of someone else. First, it may extend to our family or friends. With intentional growth, that same posture can extend to a neighborhood, a workplace, a community, an entire city, and beyond. The pattern never changes. Only the scope of our influence does.

It is never too late to make that shift, and it is never too small in scale to matter. At the end of the day, our scope is only as valuable as its ability to impact “ones.” The value of a city is not found in the idea of a city, but in the people who call it home. At the end of the day, every city is still made up of people. Mine has 2.3 million of them. Cincinnati doesn’t flourish because the concept of a city flourishes. It flourishes because its people do. The value of our influence should never be inherently measured by its size. It’s measured by whether the individuals within its reach are better because we were there.

After all, to love one neighbor well carries more weight than a citywide initiative that does not reach the humans it is designed to help.

Many of you hear the word neighbor and immediately think of the Greatest Commandments. Others hear the gentle voice of a man in a red sweater.

In honor of both, I’ll leave you with a simple question.

Won’t you be my neighbor?