An Honest Interlude

I’m going to interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to be honest with all of you.  Not that I haven’t been honest up until this point, but I feel as if I’ve been very “everything is hunky dory!” since I’ve started this blog. 

And that’s simply not true.  Tonight, I feel plagued by privilege.

It will seem unrelated at first, but, as usual, I ask that you bare with me.

As of tonight, I have killed 31 spiders in my room since I moved in.  Thirty-one!  And that’s only the ones I noticed.  There are definitely three more within my sight right now that I just haven’t had the heart to smack mercilessly with the pair of shoes I’ve designated for killing all spiders (flat bottoms with no ridges, if you must know). 

At first, when it was only around fifteen spiders total stretched over the initial clean and the first two weeks, I thought:  “This is kind of funny!”  But tonight?  Upping my total by 7 in the last half hour?  Now I’m angry.  Honestly, I almost started crying.

And no.  It’s not because there are spiders in my room and I’m irrationally afraid of them.  Although that is true. 

I’m angry because I felt sorry for myself for living in these conditions.

I made myself sick just writing that sentence. 

I know life can seem to be all about context and perspective; and given that I’ve lived in a very clean and sterile environment for my entire life I shouldn’t be shocked that I’m responding this way to living in a room meant for storage that’s infested with all kinds of critters and bugs I can’t name. 

But here’s the thing. 

Fifty yards from where I comfortably lay my head down every night, a homeless couple climbs through a gash in the chain link fence on the opposite side of our street where they spend the night under a make-shift tent built of cardboard boxes and dirty old sheets.  I know because I’ve seen them.  I know because I stare every time we drive past and park our car just fifteen feet from their “home.”  I know because I feel guilty even sitting in a vehicle.  I know because I’m afraid to talk to them.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that my heart is really heavy tonight with the realization of my own privilege.  Coming to Amate was, in part, about learning to live simply.  But my musty spider-strewn room feels like a palace.  Or at least it should.  Still, I’m struggling.  I’m feeling sorry for myself when really, I should be counting my blessings and trying harder to find ways to right the injustice of homelessness. 

Quite honestly, my own privilege breaks my heart.  And for me, I think that’s a good thing.  I want my heart to break the way God’s does when He sees the living conditions of so many neglected people.

But I don’t want to stop there.  I want that breaking to actually motivate me to do something other than sit in my warm, dry room typing on a $1,500 computer that I don’t even feel like I deserve.

Perhaps guilt or conviction (or whatever I choose to call this awful pressure-in-my-chest, lump-in-my-throat, stinging eyes feeling) isn’t what should motivate me to change and to do what I can to change this world. 

But I’ll take what I can get.

Because I need to change.

And I honestly believe the world needs me to change, too.