City of God

There are some movies that reach in and grab your heart and then instead of just dropping it to the ground, they decided to use it as a dart board for approximately 130 minutes so that at the end you really feel it not only in your chest, but your gut, and your mind.

That my friends, is how I feel about City of God. Directed by Fernando Meirelles. About Rio de Janeiro's most notorious slum.

The story is of a boy growing up in a slum surrounded by abject poverty, drug dealers, a hell of a lot of drugs, a hell of a lot of guns, and very little opportunity...even less hope. The movie narrates over three generations of slum lords all within the space of about 10 years. Little children committing cold-blooded murder. Eight year olds banning together to take over a druglord. One drug dealer taking down a couple, raping the girl in front of her boyfriend and then leaving the boyfriend alive...only to change his mind, go to his house and gun down his uncle and brother leaving his house full of bullet holes.

I like to think that I'm a fairly knowledgeable person. I try to not live in idealistic, happyland where my suburban, white-dominated, middleclass, Lutheran university life is reality. But movies like this...stories like this, remind me how little I know. How small my problems really are.

And yet the thing is, I'm still struggling. I can't get out of a rut and I'm safe every night I go to bed. I don't have to worry about where my next meal is coming from or whether or not I'm going to be safe the next time I go out the door. Hell, I go to a school where I can leave my crap in the library, go eat a meal, come back and not think twice about whether my stuff is going to be where I left it...sitting on my favorite couch.

I don't know what's more frustrating. That my heart and mind cannot be satisfied that some people live lives of horror like those depicted in this movie. Where things just happen because its what life is, and its what one person with power decided...more like one person with a gun decided. I am not okay with that being reality, and I don't like feeling like I've been given a better life than someone else, just because. I certainly don't deserve it. And right now I'm certainly not doing anything mertiable of giving back and earning it.

I feel like I want to go change something. Make something better for someone else. And not just little things. Not just "in my own little pond" things.

There is too much hurt in this world. Too much anger and hate. Too much violence and blood and gore all for naught. It's not right.

I hate living in my own little world that's fine, where my biggest problem...well. Where my problems don't even compare to millions of people's lives who despair because of hunger, disease, violence, prejudice, and hatred.

I know that everyone has to find their own ways of dealing with these problems. And I've worked on it. I've seen these types of movies before. Hell, I've been reading about the freakin' South African apartheid system all semester. I've been getting my regular reality check. And its good to have that sometimes. To be shocked out of your system. To be reminded that the body that you live in each day is just like the bodies that suffer from aids, gang violence, malnourishment, rape, human rights abuses, I could go on.

The thing is. I can talk myself into the fact that I've got to figure out myself before I can really help anyone else. I have to get my education before anyone will take me seriously enough to really help anyone else. And I've got to figure out where God is calling me to go to help. Even if it is next door. I can realize all of those things. But I still feels like I'm stealing. Like I'm mocking the millions just by sitting and typing at my Dell computer in my suburban wood frame house in Indianapolis.

And you know grace isn't a good enough answer. Because I believe in God's grace but I also want to march on up to heaven and ask him why he didn't give it to everybody else? And, yeah I mean in a worldly way...I'm a bit too steamed to talk theology right now.

I just want to go and make something better.
I also want things to be better in my head and heart.
I want tomorrow not to feel like the same, and for my goal to be something bigger than finishing my f'n term papers and trying to not fail in the last 3 weeks of the semester.
I'm tired of the in-between period. The struggle. The trying to figure things out.
And my inner hope has been the victim of a few too many emotional/mental go arounds this semester.

Stupid assignment. Stupid movie.

Stupid world.