Grocery Store Aisles

My runs to the store for food may be necessary, but I like to turn them into a puzzle: How can I craft healthy meals on a budget and adjust on the fly to what the store has in season or on sale? What do I need for stocking my shelves longer-term if there’s a deal today? And then creativity hits with something I didn’t expect to find, and I roll with an unplanned meal that sounds more fun than what was on my list. All this, and the check-out total still has to come out to an acceptable number.

With all these factors swimming in my head while I’m pushing a cart (or if I’m trying to remember what was on the list I didn’t bring), I tend to be pretty focused.

Then God interrupts.

If motherhood taught me anything, I learned that the interruptions often contain the greatest stuff of life, the worthwhile moments, the unplanned joy. They need to be embraced rather than mowed down.

That prospect of unexpected significance and the notion that even grocery shopping is the King’s business require me to add one more factor to my puzzle—eye contact (something that has become more challenging AND more necessary in these last odd months).

Every person I pass represents a story as complex and weighty as my own.

The least I can share is the light of a smile (or lately, smiling eyes? Sigh). Maybe help with an item on an upper shelf. Perhaps a silent blessing for the future of that baby in a carrier.

But sometimes my King interrupts my grocery game altogether. He makes arrangements to have my cart and someone else’s cart come to exactly the same aisle in the same store on the same day.

The odds are rather staggering when I think about it. We not only both decided to visit this store today. The order of the errands. The length of the traffic lights. The text read before getting out of the car. The sweet potatoes I went back for. The coconut milk she hunted an extra 90 seconds. And now here we both are in the cereal aisle.

My King has gone to great lengths to create this little rendezvous. For as brief and casual—or not—as it proves to be, my time is now His. And hers.

And so I celebrate her grandchildren or listen to news of an aging parent’s health.

One day, a stranger in the slow check-out line shares how much she lost during the hurricane and subsequent personal hardships. I’m not even sure how we got on the topic. I wonder if she tells everyone this, or if I’m wearing an invisible badge that says, “I’ll listen.”

On another day, a friend tells me how she’s struggling with God. She kinda wants to just break up with Him, she says, and ask for her stuff back. But I know He loves her too much to shrug His shoulders and write her off. Why else would He have arranged this meeting?

I honestly don’t remember what I said. But later while I inspect a carton of eggs, I ask Jesus to lavish His love on her in a hundred different ways that she can understand and receive.

Ditto, Lord, for the teenager with blue hair and piercings who smiled at me. And for the cashier who is complaining about her break time.

These grocery aisles are the theaters of real life. And they are holy places where heaven intersects with earth. I can assume that my day was spent in the “small potatoes” stuff of ordinary life. Or I can believe that a God who hears my prayers has somehow involved me in things that matter to Him beyond what I can observe.

I unload another round of groceries and wonder what I’m making for supper.