The God of Parking Spaces

When you need God to meet you in the big things, but man, is he even here right now?

Photo by Mitchell Griest on Unsplash

Do you believe that God cares about helping us find a parking space? I know it sounds stupid, but be honest, you’ve done it, right—prayed for a space? Maybe you were running late, or you really didn’t want to parallel park, or there just weren’t any open spaces anywhere. Nothing is more stressful than being in a crowded parking area where drivers are stalking people returning to their vehicles, competing with other swarmers for the soon-to-be available spot.

There’s a shopping center at the beach that our family likes to go to before we can check in to our place. We like to eat at a restaurant there and walk around shopping to kill time. But so does everyone else in the world, and it is so stressful to begin vacation with a car full of luggage and tired yet eager travelers that you’re not sure you like anymore after that drive, and all you want you want to do is get out of the car, but you can’t. Now you must play the impossible game of finding a parking space. It sounds so simple. And it brings out the worst in everyone. You better believe that my theology, that may have led me to look in disdain at all those people giving “all the glory to God” for their random minor victories and blessings over others, suddenly makes a shift—because, after all, it doesn’t hurt to just shoot up an arrow prayer to the Lord if he really does care about me.

I have a small section ending a chapter in my upcoming book Saving Face, with a different angle on whether God cares about our parking spaces. I won’t share all of it here, but it is a story about a flat tire and how my husband and I were summoned on the morning of prom in the pouring down rain to our son’s high school parking lot. It was a crazy rigamarole. But in reflection, it revealed to me what was in the cistern of mine and Matt’s marriage. And in that way, I saw God show up in our faces. I journaled:

If only I could make an altar with a stack of rocks in a Brunswick High School parking space, I would. To remind me and all the busy high schoolers, custodians, teachers, bus drivers, and administrators how God shows up in the ordinary, tedious moments of our day. How an unplanned annoyance revealed the playfulness and love that is in our cisterns. How withness is holiness. How I saw the absolute beauty of my family in the pouring down rain. The picture you gave me this morning, Lord. What a glory to behold.

Photo by Deniz Altindas on Unsplash

Today I find myself thinking about parking spaces again, in yet another angle. And it was in my journaling. I was on the phone with a friend the other day and we were sharing some heavy disappointments and disillusionment between us. In my life, there is a lot of uncertainty with where we will find a house (we are putting ours on the market and yet nothing looks promising for us to buy at the moment), the direction of my vocation, and still struggling for community in church (and questioning so much about what church is supposed to be). My friend and I have both suffered major betrayals. I sat there on the phone thinking that I am usually a consistent harbor of hope for myself and others, but I just felt empty. My friend asked if she could pray for me. I listened to her confidence that God had a home already picked out for us as she talked to him and I felt a bit like an eavesdropper because I didn’t have that confidence myself.

I reflected on it more that night, deciding to pray about how I used to really believe that God had our next house for us. As scary and stressful as the process was the other times we’ve moved—and it feels like a sick reality show: as soon as your house sells, you have a limited time to find a new home in a crazy market—I had faith that the shutting of doors was all part of God leading us to the home just right for us. I recalled how even in the last year, I delighted in all the little blessings, experiencing them as encounters with God’s love and care. That for a while there, I was believing in the God of parking spaces, praying as I circled the lot, smiling at his smiling at me, and sending all the little “thank yous” between the big ones.

But when I listened to my friend’s beautiful prayer, I felt numb. I felt, “maybe,” in a shrug my shoulders kind of way. In a way that maybe recognized that I’m carrying so much inner baggage in this move, I don’t know if I have room for all the actual physical energy and material baggage involved in moving. And I don’t know if I have the capacity or the faith left for any more closed doors.

That’s how I left the prayer. It was more of a confused confession. I journaled about it the next morning. Sunday morning. That’s when I realized another prayer I needed to pray. That maybe what I need right now isn’t the answers to the big things happening in my life, but some good parking spaces—ones where God reveals himself, or where, maybe said better, I can encounter him. Because sometimes you don’t think anyone cares that you’ve been fishing all night with nothing to show for it, and then a stranger tells you to cast your net on the other side of the boat. Sometimes you’re leaving town in your disillusionment, and the one person who seems like they’ve been sleeping under a rock speaks things that make your heart burst within you. Sometimes you are incapacitated, and you just give up, but your buddies open the roof to get you to Jesus. Sometimes you are minding your own business drawing water from a well in the middle of the day and run into someone who sees your face.

Sometimes you just need to know that God does care to take the time to find you a parking space.