So uncomfortably close.

I am pulling into a parking lot in front of a dorm and of course there is a car blocking me, which is to say there are students sitting and diddling on their phones and laughing and looking around, like, What? This is a parking lot and we're parked. Except you are totally blocking me from pulling around so I have to back up like a garbage truck in a straight line. I can feel myself so close to angry about this, genuinely irritated and even dangerously close to doing something productive like banging my steering wheel because, dumb dumb dumb people in cars.

[showmyads]

In the trunk of my car are two bags of clothes for a student who has none. This student comes from a place with a different climate than here. There are no warm clothes in this student's wardrobe nor is their support from parents to pay their tuition or to help the student in anyway. I crowdsourced some clothes and a sweet mama friend of mine gifted two garbage bags brimming with perfectly lovely threads. In a matter of a day, I am able to bring this student some warmth.

Here I am out in the car with my bags of goodwill, getting hopping mad at people I don't know, because they are unwittingly Getting in the Way of my Trying to do Good Here, People.

This is the staggeringly sobering thing about being human. How close we are at any given moment from doing the right thing and doing the totally evil thing. How thin is this ice upon which I skate gracefully or break through, plummeting into freezing darkness.

Lately the love for my children is making me swollen. Like my skin can't actually contain my love for being with them. And yet sometimes we are just driving home from getting the car washed where we watched and marveled at how the soapy spray of jet-suds cloaked our car and washed us clean, and one starts to bicker with the other in the backseat and heaven forbid the other lets it go and suddenly my head is ready to spin Exorcist-style and stuff is just gonna get real right now, y'all. Words are going to be expressed and not ignored.

How was Peter one day begging for the Savior not to leave him and the next totally stunned into denial of even knowing the man? How do I eat like a clean foods advocate and run like a maniac on the treadmill and then stand on the scale and feel total ill will toward my body?

We hover, we ride fences, we flirt with the lines of goodness and malice and we know how powerful and also how powerless we are from moment to moment to keep ourselves from our very selves.