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Saturday, October 17, 2009

Are there any spaceships out there?

I found God this week. Or, at least I think I did. And I found Him when I told Him not to even bother coming along, because I am so darn mad at Him. It was one of the worst weeks of my life (and I don't like saying that phrase, because it can SO EASILY be overused) but seriously. It was really bad, and quite high on the list of "bad things that have happened to me".

It started on Sunday night, while watching a movie with some boys, my mom phoned to tell me my grandmother was sick. The last time they told me a relative was sick while I as away, the relative had in fact died, and they didn't tell me until they could see me in person. So when I remembered that, and realized I didn't know if my grandmother was alive or not, I started to panic.

And then I started to get extremely behind in school. I don't know how this happened, because I had been working steadily the whole time, and all of a sudden, I found myself breaking the vows I had made, and staying up evil hours in order to binge-finish assignments. What an awful feeling. It really affects the rest of your life.

But the "icing on the cake" (or the entire new cake all it's own) is that on Wednesday night, while driving home from school, I was heading towards the highway when traffic stopped suddenly. I braked as hard as I could but my brakes weren't good enough, and I wasn't able to stop my car and I ended up rear-ending someone. Thankfully, nobody was injured, but my car is completely destroyed. The airbags went out, and the front end is totaled. The other people's car, thankfully, will drive after a couple of thousand dollars spent at the body shop, but my car will never drive again. A couple of hours later, I was charged with careless driving, which is $325 which I DO NOT HAVE... and my car was towed away. The death of the car means that I can no longer do my piano business doing music for weddings, or a photography business I was hoping to start up with a friend of mine who lives in Guelph. The businesses can still survive, but it will just be terribly inconvenient to try and arrange trips to Guelph, and transporting my piano around. Not to mention that I had signed up for evening classes at UW. Now, because my car is dead, I probably won't be able to get home till midnight most nights. But these are small matters compared to the financial situation I'm now having to deal with, which already before, was a very bad financial situation. I have some awful decisions to make in the future about insurance, and what the next steps are, and it's demoralizing, and very depressing, and unfortunately, life goes on, so I still have to get work done in school, and get caught up on life on top of all of this, which is hard enough to do without thinking about all of this and finding myself at a complete inability to concentrate.

I'm struggling with being extremely upset over everything that's happened, and I can't help but be very mad at God over all of this. Basically,

1. Why, after getting this miraculous deal on the car (a perfectly good working car for $250?) that only a few months later, simply because my brakes decided to die at the wrong moment, I no longer have a car, and in a really crummy split second, I'm suddenly in a pile of deep trouble and without any resources to help?
2. Why do some people get three or four jobs, and I don't get any? Instead of doing what all of my other unemployed friends did and bum around at home this summer, I utilize my resources, ingenuity, and talent to try and make a living for myself, and I work VERY HARD, much harder than many people around me, and I STILL don't have pennies to rub together?
3. Why on earth did nobody stop on the road to help when I crashed, but instead, pointed, laughed and honked at me and the whole accident?
4. And why are these institutions (i.e. the police, insurance) that are set up "by the people, for the people" with the sole purpose of helping people in desperate situations like this are going to inevitably screw me over royally, and blame me for my misfortune, because of their mad desire to make a couple of dollars from the misfortune of others?

The question I'm asking in the midst of all of this, is, where the is God? What on earth is He doing!? Because after praying the words, "Here I am Lord, do with me as you will" every night, I'm certainly struggling to see how this is His will, or being able to believe the naive phrase that people keep on throwing at me, which is "Oh, everything will be alright." whenever they heard what happened. It's situations like these where the best and worst of people has an opportunity to be shown, and boy is it ever shown. It just sounds so careless and generic to me whenever people say stupid things like, "It'll be fine in the end", and I find it very rude for them to believe that they are actually helping me in some way by saying something as generic and naive as that.

I want to go to outer space, and leave this planet, because this is a world full of cruel awful people who laugh at your misfortune, honk their horns at you, say generic "it will be alright" phrases. It's full of cruel awful institutions that pounce upon your downfall with their "legalities" and strip every penny away from you so they can keep it for themselves. Are there any spaceships out there?

But in the same breath... I can't end a blog like this. There are bad people out there, yes, but situations like this help me to see the goodness in people. The people I crashed into were so patient, and so nice, and really were great people to crash into, because when I get into situations like that, I panic REAL bad, and I need solid people around me to tell me it's okay or I'll pass out because I just can't breathe. And as soon as he found out, Anthony Kurevija sped over, and called Matt Harrison, and they helped me deal with the police, and in the most impressive and efficient way I had ever witnessed in my life, stripped the car of any valuable materials they were able to lay their hands on and take off without tools. Anthony did much more than any other human being would normally do to help me find the car, buy it, and put it to rest. What a wonderful person. Ryan Mahon texted me as soon as the accident happened to see if things were alright because he had a FEELING like something was wrong. And when David and Emmalee found out, they raced over to see if I was okay and brought me dinner. Two joggers who I may never meet again stayed with us for over an HOUR, directing traffic and just making sure we were all fine. When people found out about the situation, so many people prayed for me, and so many more listened sympathetically, even though I was certainly not the most fun person to be around, and I was very open about how mad I was (am?) at God. Christie Heemskerk, instead of going out like she was planning, wrote up a schedule of how I can get all my homework done over the weekend and fit it into the rest of my life, which gave me INCREDIBLE focus and ability to just concentrate, and finish everything. Good people e-mailed me to see what was wrong, and it gave me a chance to write - my most powerful medium, and articulate the painful thoughts that were flooding my mind. It's irrelevant, but Coldplay came out with yet another breathtaking piece of work, and at one point, it was the ONLY thing that made me smile that day.

People I barely know around EBC spent piles of time with me listening and allowing me to talk about it - There definitely exists some form of fear on the campus about admitting weakness in faith, and saying that yes, you're either mad at God, or struggling in your faith. I was so angry about what happened though that I lost that fear and just openly admitted about how upset I was about this whole situation, because I couldn't lie to people when they ask, "How are you?" and say that things are great. Things are bad, that's the truth, and I would much rather be honest and broken, then lie to people and say I'm good and whole.

My parents, as soon as I told them, immediately offered to pay for the whole thing. I was astounded, and in some ways, I'm still writhing in guilt over it. It would have been perfectly acceptable and so many other families would have said, "That's too bad, I'm so sorry it happened, and now you're going to have to pay for this." But instead, they offered to pay. I've never encountered such incredible mercy, and my parents don't even believe in God. How wonderful is that? What a prodigal daughter I am.

They drove down this morning to get the car out of the impound lot, and towed to the scrapyard. They then took me out to the mall, and bought me things I needed for school and living. I don't deserve it, but boy am I ever thankful. When I got back to the school, I found a note in my room with $100 in it so I can buy winter boots... they didn't sign the note, so I can't even thank them, or attempt to return the money to them. (Which is probably why they didn't sign the note)

I found God. And he was in people that surrounded me while I was down, and keep on helping to get me back on my feet again.

1 comments:

Jessie said...

I realized I swore a lot when I wrote the post, (mostly because it evoked painful memories still fresh while writing it) but I took the swear words out because I thought Mike Salvatore wouldn't be too impressed.