What Am I to Do?

My brother wrote this song. It sends chills through me. Knowing that he, when he's brutally honest, has felt the same way I do.

I don't care. Don't ask me to.

That's where God works. That uggh feeling. That fighting off of tears and empathy. That fighting off of realizing that if I actually gave a shit all of my priorities would have to change.

And here my little brother is singing about that with his beautiful voice and beautiful heart and beautiful freckles.

God works there. God is there. I thought it was worth sharing.

Lyrics below:

She walks ten miles for a cup of muddy water and I turn on the faucet to feel the water flow
And clean my hands for the fourth time today while she makes her way back home, if you can call it a home.
And she prays Lord what am I to do? Lord what am I to do?
It's been a long day so I turn the TV on and she's alone as her baby cries to sleep
Cause it hurts too bad to see her cry I blind myself to why not to live the way I do
And she prays Lord what am I to do? Lord what am I to do?
She makes the most of what she has builds on her faith and praises God for his grace
And love.
I love the clothes I wear the car I drive the greed that brings me power to hate
And can't leave these behind
So Lord what am I to do? I don't care, Oh don't ask me to.

The Day I Stole a Haitian Woman's Parking Spot

You know the people who pray for God to give them a parking spot? Well, I'm not one of them. I've secretly wished under my breath that a gap in cars lining the OBetian street was, indeed, a parking spot and not another driveway, or worse, a bus stop.

But this night I was desperate. Not, however, for a parking space, but for God. I was desperate for God to show up. Desperate for something to assuage my guilt and sadness that the world completely and undisputedly sucked. I had just watched "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" and the pain and injustice, the Nazis and concentration camps, hatred and selfishness and suffering, was too much to bear. This was in addition to the semester I had spent on a "Poverty Tour of Central America" that left me numb and questioning everything I had ever known about God and grace. I was also currently reading "Mountains Beyond Mountains" that detailed the overwhelming disease and injustice in Haiti.

I was desperate.

So I prayed about my parking space. Not that I would get one, but that I wouldn't get one. I prayed a frantic prayer relinquishing my entitlement to a parking space if it meant one woman in Haiti wouldn't die of tuberculosis that night. I breathed out please please please God DO NOT give me a parking spot.

But he did.

And not just any parking spot. The closest parking spot I'd encountered at that hour the entire time I'd lived at that house. Smack dab outside my front door. That was the final unstable plank in my Jenga composure. I performed the most excruciating parking job of my life, ran inside to my bathroom, and collapsed before my God.