I’ve been getting in and out of my car through the passenger’s side door for the past two months. I went to a rodeo with some friends and the door spontaneously refused to open, inside or out, regardless of coaxing, slamming and various insults about its mother. To my dismay, and embarrassment, it refused to open. I spent the rest of the evening feeling shamed, as if my 26-year-old car’s failures from the 198,000+ miles it had lived through was my fault.
I was determined to get it fixed, but a prompt look at my bank account dissuaded me from thinking along those lines. So therefore, I concluded, I needed a job.
After a summer of hunting, searching, failing to find, and settling for working for a family friend when he could afford it as a housekeeper, I still hadn’t made enough money to fix it. My mother offered to pay for a mechanic to take a look, my father and I tore it apart trying to get it to work, but all in all, the door remained shut.
Long story short, if you see me pull up in your company, you’ll watch me park, undo my seatbelt, then my passenger seatbelt (I have one of those fancy over the shoulder slidey-ones). Afterwards I lean back in my seat, close my eyes for a few seconds, then not unlike a Chinese contortionist, wiggle my legs into the passenger side of my car, then follow with the rest of my body while trying to avoid a painful twist of any body, open the door, then duck out from under the passenger side seatbelt before shutting it with a bow.
I do have a point to this story, contrary to popular belief of the four people who will read this article. Oftentimes in life we become incredibly complacent with the situations we’re in. Regardless of how tired, stressed, poor, or disheartened I am, I still wind up crawling through the passenger side of my car, instead of taking the time to figure out how to fix my door.
Content with brokenness moves beyond domestic circles. Being exposed to detrimental values, negative events, or potentially dangerous inconveniences can result in a numbing of our hearts and our concerns. Sometimes it’s not watching the evening news because “it’s too depressing,” or saying something potentially insensitive because a friend’s heartache has been sounding in your ear one too many times. Or it can be something as mundane as not wanting to read the homework assignment received a week ago, or not feeling the need to get a haircut even though its way past due.
By being content with this brokenness, we adopt a mentality of, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” but this also allows us to become lazy and unmotivated.
I encourage you, don’t allow it. Sometimes complacency is necessary due to the craziness of life, inability to change at the exact present, or lack of energy, and its okay to just sit and breathe for a while. But don’t let it hinder you from living life; it’s harder to go from zero to sixty than from fifteen to sixty.
P.S. I’m currently searching for the part for my car door to be fixed, please don’t think I’m going to keep sliding in and out of my tank for the rest of my life.
