A Walk With God Through the Grocery Store
Decay will take place in everything I see, change will occur in most everything I can even imagine, save one. Me. And you. The real me and you, the beautiful image of God within that nothing can touch because we are, in that place, as beautiful and timeless as our Creator.
We’ve all heard we should never to go to the grocery store when we’re hungry, but I beg to differ, otherwise you’ll come home with none of the good stuff and only the sensible stuff, the stuff you look at and say, “There’s nothing to eat.” My friend, writer Marilyn Griffith, tells a story about one of her children going from cabinet to cabinet looking for something to eat. “Mom,” she called from the kitchen, “all we have are ingredients!”
We hunger, we thirst, we crave. We also rebuff, refuse, and turn down our nose.
“The problem you get into,” says God as we enter the store proper, the floral department to our left shouting at us, perhaps even cheering us on, with colors both natural and manufactured, all bright and given to a happy disposition, “is believing your turned down nose should be everybody’s turned down nose.”
I get what God means, at least in how I understand it. People like what they like. I love raw oysters, that clean, sweet and salty brine that washes over your tongue, offsetting the consistency of the oyster. Add some zingy cocktail sauce to the mix with a squirt of fresh lemon juice, and I could sit there all day slurping those things down. Maybe you don’t like that. Even the thought might make you feel nauseous. That’s your call. We all have varying likes and dislikes. And even the reasons for them are different. For some it’s a matter of texture. Others taste. Perhaps color. Maybe the broccoli casserole is touching the macaroni and cheese! Heaven forbid!
There’s no better place to view our preferences than the grocery store. Even in the floral department, roses in all sizes gather, from the delicate sprays of tiny buds all collecting on slender branches to the Dozen Roses roses, deep red and swollen with a hoped for passion on the part of the receiver and, most definitely, reflective of the passion or perhaps contrition of the giver. Yet despite the beauty of the rose, there are some people who have decided they don’t like roses.
I don’t get it, either. Or, wait, perhaps you do?
“I do,” says God. “On their face, of course roses are beautiful, everything I made is, would you agree?”
Yes. Although, bug faces? I may as yet need a little convincing about those. I can’t come upon an extreme close up of one without shuddering. As a kid, they downright scared the willies out of me.
“They are rather complicated. But to other bugs, they’re Diana rising from the sea.”
Beauty in the eye of the beholder? I get that too. As a writer, I’ve always referred to that as a cup of tea. I’m well aware of the fact that not everybody’s drinking what I’m pouring. So, okay, if bug faces are beautiful to other bugs, I guess they are beautiful. Do you think they’re beautiful?
“Of course.”
Of course. I sigh. Will I ever see inherent beauty like God does? Will that cracked parking lot outside the grocery store ever be more than an eyesore, a location that brings on more frustration than gratitude on busy Saturday mornings?
“It would if you had to walk three miles everyday and bring your food home on your back and your water on your head.”
We look at each other. Why does everything have to be a guilt trip?
“It doesn’t. You could choose to see the convenience right away and find beauty in that. You can always choose to elevate your perception.” God picks up a stem of gladiolus shining a preternatural emerald green. “It’s not always your fault you fail to see these things, child. You don’t have to feel guilty. Again, your choice. But you can choose to lift your view once having seen the view you’ve adopted causes suffering no matter how small. What do you think of this flower?” The gladiolus, spikes for leaves, blooms busting out in quick succession up the turgid stem might just be the cracked parking lot of the botanical world.
I don’t like it.
“Why?”
They remind me of funerals.
“Do they remind you of funerals, or did they remind your mother of funerals?”
Okay, God. So is this about the roses?
“Yes. You know why some people turn down their noses at roses?”
I don’t know, really, but I enjoyed that little poem.
“I did, too. What if, to that particular nose-turner, a particular relative who abused them wore rose-scented perfume? What if, to another, they fell into a rose bush when they were little, got scraped up like a checkerboard by the thorns, maybe even sprained their ankle in the fall? Do they get a pass on enjoying roses like you do?”
Yes. If I get a pass on not liking gladiolus flowers for a reason that isn’t even my own, I suppose extending that choice to others for far better reasons—
“Or not.”
—or not, is a very good way to lay down judgement when it comes to things that just don’t matter.
I think of the world, all the matters of opinion out there and inside of myself; I think the percentage of them that don’t mean a thing to anyone, including myself, has got to be over ninety percent.
“I’d say that’s a little low. Human beings feel that opinions make up who they are. Where would you be without them, you wonder.”
I don’t know. What I do know is that the older people get, the less of them they have. The oldest person I know doesn’t really care about what other people put on their bodies, what kind of car they drive, or judge every little thing they put into their mouths.
“This is true. And many get there by trial and error. What opinions did they hold that seemed so important but were too weighty to drag around and remain nimble to the life in front of them? What judgements didn’t matter, didn’t do anything for the better, by hanging around their neck, big enough so that everybody could see them from the other end of a football field.”
Those aren’t necklaces, those are chains.
“You’re quick.”
Who knew a walk in the grocery store could be so enlightening? But is it surprising? We can sit in our homes and look at each item, things we love, things we hate but love because someone else loved them. And the grocery store is no different. I shop mostly fresh produce and organic. When I stand in the natural foods sections of each aisle, refusing to buy certain foods that others can’t wait to pour into their mouths, I’ll admit, I feel as if my opinion, my standards, are higher. Before you judge, let me be quick to say, I don’t like this about myself.
“So you allow your opinions and the opinions of others to form who you believe yourself to be.”
Well, yes, God. If you want to put it so brutally, yes.
“It’s not brutal, it just is. I see no value judgement in what I just said, do you?”
No. I don’t. I sigh and ask the inevitable question, the question that swims like a million minnows in each item before our eyes, each choice among thousands of choices, that all boil down to, “Just pick one!”
Who am I, then?
God doesn’t answer, guiding us through the bulk foods, down the cereal aisle, past the pet food, the office supplies and notions. We see canned fruit, canned peas, dried fruit, pasta, beans, many items exactly the same but packaged differently, creating brand loyalty and, yes, identity.
So we pick and choose and hang unnecessary chains about our neck, unaware, if how proudly we display them is any indication, that eventually, they swallow us whole, rising and rising higher and higher, up to our chins, our noses, and finally, covering our eyes so we can see nothing other than what we think.
The little carts.
The big carts.
Hand basket.
Fresh vegetables only, locally sourced.
Store brand.
Name brand.
Craft beer.
Bud light.
It’s Hellman’s Mayonnaise or nothing.
Fried to a crackly crunch.
Baked to a delicate crunch.
Dill pickles on my burgers.
Sweet pickles in my tuna.
Kitty litter that clumps.
Kitty litter that’s natural.
Debit cards.
Cash only.
Flowers once a week.
Why give flowers to anyone when all they do is die?
Paper.
Plastic.
Are you using your own bags?
Where’s the volume button on this blasted screen?!
No, I won’t give to your sports team. I paid for my kids’ activities, your parents can pay for yours.
Why of course, here’s some change, Salvation Army volunteers!
No, thank you, I can take my own groceries to the car.
Trunk or seat?
Thank goodness, I made it out alive.
I forgot to pick up my prescription!
LET’S JUST GET HOME, ALL RIGHT?
It’s hard to breathe with all that covering our mouths and noses. I suddenly long for emptiness, for a store that has one thing, one food that’s tasty enough to be eaten for every meal, inexpensive, and will fill that empty place without my having to worry about a thing. Could someone invent that, please?
“Opinions can be fine, child,” God says, gently. “It’s fine not to like eating something, wearing something, or doing something. That’s called being an individual. It’s placing value judgements on those things. It’s finding fault. Do you think I really care whether or not women wear yoga pants?”
We laugh.
“The truth is, you have been taught to put shame onto a lot of things that don’t matter and on some that very much do. The very form I created that is your body, for one. You shame it or make an object of it. Garner the lesson from that as you will. But I for one look upon the body differently. And look around you.” God ushers us to the portion of the store known as Health and Beauty. “Most products here exist because you see yourselves as less than. If there is one opinion that is most harmful it is that you are lacking in any way, just as you are, just as I created you.”
I have a feeling we’re about to get to the meat of this conversation here by the makeup. In front of us are more beautiful women than I can almost stand to see. Their eyes, slanted and winged with liner, their lips covered in pigment that tells of their perfection so they don’t have to, their cheekbones, glossy hair, all of it. I look away. I didn’t know the grocery store was going to bring this. I feel a little blindsided. I thought we were talking about identity and the power of choice, and you have to go and make this personal, God. We could have gone to the pharmacy on the corner you know, and I would have been more emotionally prepared.
“Then you wouldn’t have seen the flowers,” God says. “The same thing applies here. You were told this is the only standard of beauty. By who?”
I can answer that a lot of ways. But I actually remember the first time I felt severely lacking in the Health and Beauty department, particularly the beauty department. I was in ninth grade and I had bought my first Seventeen Magazine. You know where I am going with this, don’t you? If you are male, forgive me, I honestly don’t know of an equivalent for you. Sure, there are body building magazines, but everybody knows that’s more of a sport, not an expectation for walking to work. Yes, you have Forbes and Money and Car & Driver, but money isn’t your very fabric, and neither are cars.
Still, lack is lack, isn’t it? And I’m sorry for the ways you’re told you’re not enough, too.
But these magazines, they tell another story, and they’ve been doing it for decades. They show the fall clothing, outfits and outfits, so many most parents, no matter how much money they have, wouldn’t dream of purchasing. They show hairdos you’ll never replicate and they show perfect people. In some way, shape, or form, whether it’s your body, your face, your wardrobe, your shoes, or your school bag, that you, sweet pea, are lacking.
I looked at the fall spread in this magazine I bought with my own money over and over again. And there she was, my idea of perfection, and to this day I remember her. Long blonde hair down to her waist, a broad smile with canine teeth of a perfect sharpness. Her eyes slanted at the corners and long eyelashes framed them like the curled grasses surrounding the prettiest of lakes reflecting an April sky. She wore a red and white cheerleading costume, the same colors as my own uniform, and in one picture her hair was pulled into a high ponytail with a red ribbon. The ponytail was split into three sections, braided, and at the end of each braid, a perfect, little red bow ended the do.
I gave up. I did.
Something inside of me died with that picture because I knew I would never look like that. Nobody would ever think I, brown-haired Lisa with bird-like features and legs not even close to a mile long, was pretty enough to grace the pages of Seventeen Magazine.
Yes, people told me about photo touch ups and the miracles that are performed to make women look perfect in the cosmetologist’s chair pre-shoot, but in 1978, in a bedroom in Lutherville, Maryland, that just didn’t matter. I was less than. I was lacking if the model in the Seventeen Magazine was the standard.
That lacking strung itself all over my psyche as if a spider danced a tune and spun its spinerettes, spinning and spinning a never ending web. It consumed every part of me until life became nothing but a heavy web of comparison and while I cannot say I was always on the losing end, there were some water droplets God deposited to sparkle and shine—the knowledge that I would never be the all around best, the winner of winners, in any category I could think of—cast a shadow.
“Throw that out,” God says. “In fact, let’s leave this aisle behind because I want to show you something.”
But I just bared my soul.
“No, you didn’t. You bared your shame. Child, the difference between the two is so vast you will only be able to comprehend it for yourself.”
We walk across the front of the store, past more displays, to the produce department. I observe each person that we pass: male, female, aged, new, dressed up, wearing pajama bottoms and hoodies, brown-skinned, pink-skinned, tall, short, in-between, brunettes, blondes, red-heads, green-haired, black-haired. I could give a thousand more descriptors, but doesn’t matter because, you know what? Not a single one of them looks like the women on the makeup packaging or that young lady in Seventeen magazine.
“It’s not real,” God says. “You understand that, don’t you?”
Not usually.
“Well, think about it more, if you don’t mind. And do this right now. Picture everybody you pass naked, free of cosmetics or style, heck, bald if you’d like. And what happens?”
I see different body types. Athletic, fat, droopy and old, baby bodies, skinny people, long-limbed, short-limbed, big heads, little heads.
“Good. That’s good, because for you to understand who you really are, you have to go even deeper. To understand there is no lacking in who you really are, you have to even remove this wonderful creation called the body.”
Now a lot of people beg to differ with that.
“It’s called self-preservation. It’s an animal instinct. That’s fine. And I’m not discounting the importance of respecting your body. But you are an eternal being and I think we can all agree you’re not taking your body with you as it is right now.”
A lot of people beg to differ with that, too. Although, I think they’ll be surprised and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll be surprised about a lot of things too.
“So remove the bodies and what do you see?”
I see their spirits.
“And?”
They’re neither fat nor thin and not a particular color, either. They’re just airy and light.
“Now, one more time. Go even deeper. What is lighting up those spirits?”
The soul! I see it! There’s a spark in everyone I see. We’re all like fireflies milling about on a summer night. The grocery store becomes something vastly different. This is beyond lack, beyond opinion, beyond placement, beyond perception.
“This is reality,” says God. “For you see it, don’t you? That light that is who you are, starts with who I Am. Beyond the food, the packaging, the choices even, is One thing, Creation born from the heart of the Creator. You are part of me. That spark, that essence, that life, that Image of God, if you’d like, is real. It’s the only part of you that is real because it is the only part of you that will last, it’s the only part of you that has always been.”
I feel it even more than I see it. It feels like warmth, it feels like light, in perfect portions.
“Exactly. If you can recognize that not only in others, but in yourself, children, you will find that there is nothing that can define you in such a way that is anything but the truth of who you really are, and who you really are is Mine. A lively little spark of the One in whom you live and move and have your being. All the rest has been placed upon your shoulders, a heavy burden you assume to be who you are, when, truly, it is the work of critics who think I didn’t do a good enough job.”
I’m none of this, I realize, looking around. I don’t stand in relation to it. How could I? These products all have a shelf-life. Those cards on the beauty items will be literally thrown on the dump heap. Decay will take place in everything I see, change will occur in most everything I can even imagine, save one. Me. And you. The real me and you, the beautiful image of God within that nothing can touch because we are, in that place, as beautiful and timeless as our Creator.
I grab your hand. This is very good news, isn’t it? We should celebrate with a cup of coffee at the grocery store Starbucks.
“My treat,” God says.
Are you getting the pumpkin spice latte?
“Of course. I can be as basic as anybody else.”
God doesn’t have to prove anything through beverage choice.
And I guess, neither do I. Neither do you.
Like what you like.
Be who you are. And be that well. —St. Francis de Sales
We’ve all heard we should never to go to the grocery store when we’re hungry, but I beg to differ, otherwise you’ll come home with none of the good stuff and only the sensible stuff, the stuff you look at and say, “There’s nothing to eat.” My friend, writer Marilyn Griffith, tells a story about one of her children going from cabinet to cabinet looking for something to eat. “Mom,” she called from the kitchen, “all we have are ingredients!”
We hunger, we thirst, we crave. We also rebuff, refuse, and turn down our nose.
“The problem you get into,” says God as we enter the store proper, the floral department to our left shouting at us, perhaps even cheering us on, with colors both natural and manufactured, all bright and given to a happy disposition, “is believing your turned down nose should be everybody’s turned down nose.”
I get what God means, at least in how I understand it. People like what they like. I love raw oysters, that clean, sweet and salty brine that washes over your tongue, offsetting the consistency of the oyster. Add some zingy cocktail sauce to the mix with a squirt of fresh lemon juice, and I could sit there all day slurping those things down. Maybe you don’t like that. Even the thought might make you feel nauseous. That’s your call. We all have varying likes and dislikes. And even the reasons for them are different. For some it’s a matter of texture. Others taste. Perhaps color. Maybe the broccoli casserole is touching the macaroni and cheese! Heaven forbid!
There’s no better place to view our preferences than the grocery store. Even in the floral department, roses in all sizes gather, from the delicate sprays of tiny buds all collecting on slender branches to the Dozen Roses roses, deep red and swollen with a hoped for passion on the part of the receiver and, most definitely, reflective of the passion or perhaps contrition of the giver. Yet despite the beauty of the rose, there are some people who have decided they don’t like roses.
I don’t get it, either. Or, wait, perhaps you do?
“I do,” says God. “On their face, of course roses are beautiful, everything I made is, would you agree?”
Yes. Although, bug faces? I may as yet need a little convincing about those. I can’t come upon an extreme close up of one without shuddering. As a kid, they downright scared the willies out of me.
“They are rather complicated. But to other bugs, they’re Diana rising from the sea.”
Beauty in the eye of the beholder? I get that too. As a writer, I’ve always referred to that as a cup of tea. I’m well aware of the fact that not everybody’s drinking what I’m pouring. So, okay, if bug faces are beautiful to other bugs, I guess they are beautiful. Do you think they’re beautiful?
“Of course.”
Of course. I sigh. Will I ever see inherent beauty like God does? Will that cracked parking lot outside the grocery store ever be more than an eyesore, a location that brings on more frustration than gratitude on busy Saturday mornings?
“It would if you had to walk three miles everyday and bring your food home on your back and your water on your head.”
We look at each other. Why does everything have to be a guilt trip?
“It doesn’t. You could choose to see the convenience right away and find beauty in that. You can always choose to elevate your perception.” God picks up a stem of gladiolus shining a preternatural emerald green. “It’s not always your fault you fail to see these things, child. You don’t have to feel guilty. Again, your choice. But you can choose to lift your view once having seen the view you’ve adopted causes suffering no matter how small. What do you think of this flower?” The gladiolus, spikes for leaves, blooms busting out in quick succession up the turgid stem might just be the cracked parking lot of the botanical world.
I don’t like it.
“Why?”
They remind me of funerals.
“Do they remind you of funerals, or did they remind your mother of funerals?”
Okay, God. So is this about the roses?
“Yes. You know why some people turn down their noses at roses?”
I don’t know, really, but I enjoyed that little poem.
“I did, too. What if, to that particular nose-turner, a particular relative who abused them wore rose-scented perfume? What if, to another, they fell into a rose bush when they were little, got scraped up like a checkerboard by the thorns, maybe even sprained their ankle in the fall? Do they get a pass on enjoying roses like you do?”
Yes. If I get a pass on not liking gladiolus flowers for a reason that isn’t even my own, I suppose extending that choice to others for far better reasons—
“Or not.”
—or not, is a very good way to lay down judgement when it comes to things that just don’t matter.
I think of the world, all the matters of opinion out there and inside of myself; I think the percentage of them that don’t mean a thing to anyone, including myself, has got to be over ninety percent.
“I’d say that’s a little low. Human beings feel that opinions make up who they are. Where would you be without them, you wonder.”
I don’t know. What I do know is that the older people get, the less of them they have. The oldest person I know doesn’t really care about what other people put on their bodies, what kind of car they drive, or judge every little thing they put into their mouths.
“This is true. And many get there by trial and error. What opinions did they hold that seemed so important but were too weighty to drag around and remain nimble to the life in front of them? What judgements didn’t matter, didn’t do anything for the better, by hanging around their neck, big enough so that everybody could see them from the other end of a football field.”
Those aren’t necklaces, those are chains.
“You’re quick.”
Who knew a walk in the grocery store could be so enlightening? But is it surprising? We can sit in our homes and look at each item, things we love, things we hate but love because someone else loved them. And the grocery store is no different. I shop mostly fresh produce and organic. When I stand in the natural foods sections of each aisle, refusing to buy certain foods that others can’t wait to pour into their mouths, I’ll admit, I feel as if my opinion, my standards, are higher. Before you judge, let me be quick to say, I don’t like this about myself.
“So you allow your opinions and the opinions of others to form who you believe yourself to be.”
Well, yes, God. If you want to put it so brutally, yes.
“It’s not brutal, it just is. I see no value judgement in what I just said, do you?”
No. I don’t. I sigh and ask the inevitable question, the question that swims like a million minnows in each item before our eyes, each choice among thousands of choices, that all boil down to, “Just pick one!”
Who am I, then?
God doesn’t answer, guiding us through the bulk foods, down the cereal aisle, past the pet food, the office supplies and notions. We see canned fruit, canned peas, dried fruit, pasta, beans, many items exactly the same but packaged differently, creating brand loyalty and, yes, identity.
So we pick and choose and hang unnecessary chains about our neck, unaware, if how proudly we display them is any indication, that eventually, they swallow us whole, rising and rising higher and higher, up to our chins, our noses, and finally, covering our eyes so we can see nothing other than what we think.
The little carts.
The big carts.
Hand basket.
Fresh vegetables only, locally sourced.
Store brand.
Name brand.
Craft beer.
Bud light.
It’s Hellman’s Mayonnaise or nothing.
Fried to a crackly crunch.
Baked to a delicate crunch.
Dill pickles on my burgers.
Sweet pickles in my tuna.
Kitty litter that clumps.
Kitty litter that’s natural.
Debit cards.
Cash only.
Flowers once a week.
Why give flowers to anyone when all they do is die?
Paper.
Plastic.
Are you using your own bags?
Where’s the volume button on this blasted screen?!
No, I won’t give to your sports team. I paid for my kids’ activities, your parents can pay for yours.
Why of course, here’s some change, Salvation Army volunteers!
No, thank you, I can take my own groceries to the car.
Trunk or seat?
Thank goodness, I made it out alive.
I forgot to pick up my prescription!
LET’S JUST GET HOME, ALL RIGHT?
It’s hard to breathe with all that covering our mouths and noses. I suddenly long for emptiness, for a store that has one thing, one food that’s tasty enough to be eaten for every meal, inexpensive, and will fill that empty place without my having to worry about a thing. Could someone invent that, please?
“Opinions can be fine, child,” God says, gently. “It’s fine not to like eating something, wearing something, or doing something. That’s called being an individual. It’s placing value judgements on those things. It’s finding fault. Do you think I really care whether or not women wear yoga pants?”
We laugh.
“The truth is, you have been taught to put shame onto a lot of things that don’t matter and on some that very much do. The very form I created that is your body, for one. You shame it or make an object of it. Garner the lesson from that as you will. But I for one look upon the body differently. And look around you.” God ushers us to the portion of the store known as Health and Beauty. “Most products here exist because you see yourselves as less than. If there is one opinion that is most harmful it is that you are lacking in any way, just as you are, just as I created you.”
I have a feeling we’re about to get to the meat of this conversation here by the makeup. In front of us are more beautiful women than I can almost stand to see. Their eyes, slanted and winged with liner, their lips covered in pigment that tells of their perfection so they don’t have to, their cheekbones, glossy hair, all of it. I look away. I didn’t know the grocery store was going to bring this. I feel a little blindsided. I thought we were talking about identity and the power of choice, and you have to go and make this personal, God. We could have gone to the pharmacy on the corner you know, and I would have been more emotionally prepared.
“Then you wouldn’t have seen the flowers,” God says. “The same thing applies here. You were told this is the only standard of beauty. By who?”
I can answer that a lot of ways. But I actually remember the first time I felt severely lacking in the Health and Beauty department, particularly the beauty department. I was in ninth grade and I had bought my first Seventeen Magazine. You know where I am going with this, don’t you? If you are male, forgive me, I honestly don’t know of an equivalent for you. Sure, there are body building magazines, but everybody knows that’s more of a sport, not an expectation for walking to work. Yes, you have Forbes and Money and Car & Driver, but money isn’t your very fabric, and neither are cars.
Still, lack is lack, isn’t it? And I’m sorry for the ways you’re told you’re not enough, too.
But these magazines, they tell another story, and they’ve been doing it for decades. They show the fall clothing, outfits and outfits, so many most parents, no matter how much money they have, wouldn’t dream of purchasing. They show hairdos you’ll never replicate and they show perfect people. In some way, shape, or form, whether it’s your body, your face, your wardrobe, your shoes, or your school bag, that you, sweet pea, are lacking.
I looked at the fall spread in this magazine I bought with my own money over and over again. And there she was, my idea of perfection, and to this day I remember her. Long blonde hair down to her waist, a broad smile with canine teeth of a perfect sharpness. Her eyes slanted at the corners and long eyelashes framed them like the curled grasses surrounding the prettiest of lakes reflecting an April sky. She wore a red and white cheerleading costume, the same colors as my own uniform, and in one picture her hair was pulled into a high ponytail with a red ribbon. The ponytail was split into three sections, braided, and at the end of each braid, a perfect, little red bow ended the do.
I gave up. I did.
Something inside of me died with that picture because I knew I would never look like that. Nobody would ever think I, brown-haired Lisa with bird-like features and legs not even close to a mile long, was pretty enough to grace the pages of Seventeen Magazine.
Yes, people told me about photo touch ups and the miracles that are performed to make women look perfect in the cosmetologist’s chair pre-shoot, but in 1978, in a bedroom in Lutherville, Maryland, that just didn’t matter. I was less than. I was lacking if the model in the Seventeen Magazine was the standard.
That lacking strung itself all over my psyche as if a spider danced a tune and spun its spinerettes, spinning and spinning a never ending web. It consumed every part of me until life became nothing but a heavy web of comparison and while I cannot say I was always on the losing end, there were some water droplets God deposited to sparkle and shine—the knowledge that I would never be the all around best, the winner of winners, in any category I could think of—cast a shadow.
“Throw that out,” God says. “In fact, let’s leave this aisle behind because I want to show you something.”
But I just bared my soul.
“No, you didn’t. You bared your shame. Child, the difference between the two is so vast you will only be able to comprehend it for yourself.”
We walk across the front of the store, past more displays, to the produce department. I observe each person that we pass: male, female, aged, new, dressed up, wearing pajama bottoms and hoodies, brown-skinned, pink-skinned, tall, short, in-between, brunettes, blondes, red-heads, green-haired, black-haired. I could give a thousand more descriptors, but doesn’t matter because, you know what? Not a single one of them looks like the women on the makeup packaging or that young lady in Seventeen magazine.
“It’s not real,” God says. “You understand that, don’t you?”
Not usually.
“Well, think about it more, if you don’t mind. And do this right now. Picture everybody you pass naked, free of cosmetics or style, heck, bald if you’d like. And what happens?”
I see different body types. Athletic, fat, droopy and old, baby bodies, skinny people, long-limbed, short-limbed, big heads, little heads.
“Good. That’s good, because for you to understand who you really are, you have to go even deeper. To understand there is no lacking in who you really are, you have to even remove this wonderful creation called the body.”
Now a lot of people beg to differ with that.
“It’s called self-preservation. It’s an animal instinct. That’s fine. And I’m not discounting the importance of respecting your body. But you are an eternal being and I think we can all agree you’re not taking your body with you as it is right now.”
A lot of people beg to differ with that, too. Although, I think they’ll be surprised and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ll be surprised about a lot of things too.
“So remove the bodies and what do you see?”
I see their spirits.
“And?”
They’re neither fat nor thin and not a particular color, either. They’re just airy and light.
“Now, one more time. Go even deeper. What is lighting up those spirits?”
The soul! I see it! There’s a spark in everyone I see. We’re all like fireflies milling about on a summer night. The grocery store becomes something vastly different. This is beyond lack, beyond opinion, beyond placement, beyond perception.
“This is reality,” says God. “For you see it, don’t you? That light that is who you are, starts with who I Am. Beyond the food, the packaging, the choices even, is One thing, Creation born from the heart of the Creator. You are part of me. That spark, that essence, that life, that Image of God, if you’d like, is real. It’s the only part of you that is real because it is the only part of you that will last, it’s the only part of you that has always been.”
I feel it even more than I see it. It feels like warmth, it feels like light, in perfect portions.
“Exactly. If you can recognize that not only in others, but in yourself, children, you will find that there is nothing that can define you in such a way that is anything but the truth of who you really are, and who you really are is Mine. A lively little spark of the One in whom you live and move and have your being. All the rest has been placed upon your shoulders, a heavy burden you assume to be who you are, when, truly, it is the work of critics who think I didn’t do a good enough job.”
I’m none of this, I realize, looking around. I don’t stand in relation to it. How could I? These products all have a shelf-life. Those cards on the beauty items will be literally thrown on the dump heap. Decay will take place in everything I see, change will occur in most everything I can even imagine, save one. Me. And you. The real me and you, the beautiful image of God within that nothing can touch because we are, in that place, as beautiful and timeless as our Creator.
I grab your hand. This is very good news, isn’t it? We should celebrate with a cup of coffee at the grocery store Starbucks.
“My treat,” God says.
Are you getting the pumpkin spice latte?
“Of course. I can be as basic as anybody else.”
God doesn’t have to prove anything through beverage choice.
And I guess, neither do I. Neither do you.
Like what you like.
Be who you are. And be that well. —St. Francis de Sales
Love.
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