“When I first saw him come around the corner toward our house, I thought he looked just like Moses coming out of the wilderness,” she told me. At that point in his life, he looked more like a homeless person than a hero, thin and ragged with an unruly beard and a slow shuffling pace. Somehow, that’s not at all what Irene saw, so she offered him work right there on the spot. She needed help in her garden and he looked like a gift from heaven to her.

Irene and her husband, Tim, live right on the corner of the local park, in a big, turn of the century house. Built in the early 1900s, it is made of stone delivered from a local quarry on the train that runs right through the middle of the old town. It looks like a fortress and I’ve heard that more than one person has found a refuge there over the years. I think that’s mostly because of Tim and Irene.

The young man had been suffering from clinical depression and a host of other undiagnosed ailments. In the past year he’d had a series of misfortunes. He’d fallen asleep driving on the expressway and totaled his car. Somehow he managed to suffer only minor injuries himself. He’d lost his last job because he just couldn’t seem to keep up. He was on a downward spiral like a heavy truck with no brakes, barreling down a mountain road and no safety ramp to stop his runaway life. But when he turned the corner that day, looking for some work, he found two people who didn’t mind.

So, he helped them dig holes for the trees and bushes they couldn’t resist buying even though they seemed to already have plenty. He mulched, pruned, planted, and watered. Sometimes, when he took a break, he would sit on the cool porch with the couple and talk. It took awhile for him to open up. Irene said later that he talked occasionally about his father leaving before he was born. She responded that even though his father had left, he must have had someone who loved him very much. She said no one grows a kind heart like his without a lot of love.

Later that year, the young man found the help he’d been looking for—a place that diagnosed his problem and helped him get on the right track. Eventually he found good men who loved him and helped grow his boy’s heart into a man’s. A year after he left, his mother took a walk near the park. She saw Tim and Irene and stopped, identifying herself as the young man’s mother. That’s when she began to hear the stories. Irene and Tim had been listening to and praying for and loving her son while he worked in their yard.

“I knew something was wrong, I just didn’t know what,” Irene said. “So, we just prayed for him. We are still praying for him.” His mother was amazed to learn that right up the street, in the most unlikely place, from people she didn’t even know, her son had been covered in prayer.

Now when she goes walking and sees the couple on the porch or in their yard, she stops to chat. When the young man got married last year, his mother showed them pictures of the wedding. She shared the drawings he’d created and given to her as Christmas gifts each year. And she learned that Tim and Irene’s son needed a kidney transplant.

Now it was her turn to pray. While their son still doesn’t have his new kidney, he is doing better than expected. And all this—this kindness, this kinship, this opening and sharing of hearts, it all started with a neighbor who saw Moses coming over to her yard asking for work instead of the broken young man from down the street.

This month, when the flowers are blooming, and the smell of newly mown grass brings back tender childhood memories, and people are beginning to plant again, I’m celebrating the hope that comes from neighbors.