OK. So I should actually get around to my laundromat lessons before I forget them, and be THAT person with a random cliffhanger...
Why exactly did I go? Several reasons, including a marginal sense of fascination.
Normally I do my laundry at an adopted family's house. It was the night before Mother's Day: ironic, but not exactly considerate. Also, I needed to wash tennis shoes: not articles I want to put in someone else's washer/dryer.
Curiousity for laundromats probably started as a single digit person when my family would wash dog rags there. It felt like stepping back a couple decades, with the old arcade games, florescent lights, and bright painting jobs reminiscent of rollerskating derbies and strange odors.
Anyways, thus I began prepping for the ghetto. {Not that it took much} At the moment, I was VERY dirty after a long day of working out and cleaning in grungy nasties. The hybrid moment of cognition was just not caring what I looked like.
But I wasn't prepared for how well off my life is. I was there out of experimental convenience and not because I had to, while the woman, construction worker, couple, and man I saw there didn't seem to have that luxury.
It's hard to describe, and my heart is not to demean; but everything from the Walmart quality aura, hawaiian shirts, and all manner of smoking mediums testified that I was no longer in my upper middle class ignorance.
After paying ridiculous amounts for the experience {$9-10 for two loads}, handwashing some soap the machine missed out of multiple items, and shaking my head at the depressing irony of the radio choices {everybody's workin for the weekend...}, the metaphor of cycles continued sinking into my head. Cycles of choices, of rivets in society, heart, and thought patterns that require strategic attack to overcome/break.
More than what actually transpired, I'm pretty ashamed at the emotions and reactions that were locked and loaded for me like: tangible fear of these strangers, demeaning pity, and the kind of pride that dunks your siblings under water to stay afloat.
While images of the woman old enough to be my Mom, small enough to be pubescent, walking into the distance of filmy darkess pierced by liquor store lights and busy intersections swirl with the laughably cheesy bullein board of piano teacher advertisements and oldschool tract....the answer I want is HOW.
How do I love these people when clearly my flesh is proving that I am not believing in their equality with myself? What exactly does bashing through cultural barriers like Jesus did look like in these situations? What are we supposed to learn from all this?
Because I clearly felt like I was in their world but not of it. But instead of making me bold to share and speak and learn about them, I retreated in agony at the concept of their lostness. In that, I disconnected from reality, which is a great place to theorize but not all that great to practice.
Originally I planned to discuss things like being able to identify value and the injustices of subliminal marketing and the traps of self-UNawareness. But the cycles I really want out of are the entrenched consructions of class, worth, and barriers that I willingly allow to be enflicted on the gospel.
It's hurting us, all of us, not just in offensive actions of speaking out against, but in the defensive silences and lies that continue to isolate us with ego-centric worldviews rather than gospel-transforming eyesight.
I'm tired. And disobedient. I need resurrection.
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