One of my favorite pastimes is early morning grocery shopping. No, not like 6am grocery shopping...more like 1am. Safeway feels like a different store at that time of the day, although surprisingly more people actually shop in those wee hours than you would probably think. Besides the obstacle courses of boxes being sorted and stocked onto the shelves, you can practically breeze through your shopping list. (If you do decide to embark on a midnight grocery run, it's much more fun to bring a buddy along.)
Point being, even during the middle of the night I could still browse the aisles of cereals and canned goods, choose the best bag of grapes, and pick the Charmin toilet paper over the Quilted Northern.
This past week I brought a family to Kampala for medical evaluation. This family lives "up-country" - meaning, more or less, a rural village a few hours outside the city-life of Kampala where not a lot of resources are available.
The three children in the family all have Sickle Cell Disease. At 16-, 14-, and 5-years old, these kids know more about pain and feeling tired and sick than I have known in my entire life.
In Kampala, they went through a battery of tests. The middle child, Kizito, was so dehydrated he had to be poked 4 times for his blood tests. I squeezed his hand and told him that if he could be brave enough to get through it we would have ice cream later.
The kids had never been to the city before, so, even though they were here to see the doctor, they were full of smiles and wide-eyed wonder at the sights of the busy streets and big buildings.
The highlight of their trip was getting to visit Shoprite, one of Kampala's biggest grocery stores. The town they come from has nothing that even comes close to a grocery store - Shoprite is something they only see in the magical land of television.
The three kids, their mother, a friend, and I wandered the store together. I held little 5-year old Yusuf's hand and we went down every aisle, starting with beverages and ending with cleaning supplies. We stopped periodically to explain things to the kids - like how meat is packaged and kept in a refrigerated aisle - and look at the strange conveniences of such a modern store - like packaged vegetables and limitless varieties of cookies and crackers.
To look at their faces you would have thought they were in Disneyland - full of happiness and wonder.
Winnie, the oldest turned to me with bright eyes and said, "Everything here is so beautiful!"
We got our ice cream, carefully chosen cups of chocolate and vanilla flavors, but as we checked out, the kids were much more excited about each having their own yellow plastic bag with the red word "Shoprite" printed on it - so that they could show it to their friends at school and prove that they actually visited Shoprite!!
I've never felt so humble and honored to walk the aisles of a grocery store before. To me, it is part of normal life, a necessity. For these kids, it was a memory they will remember for the rest of their lives.
It was a moment that reminded me how small my world is, how enshrouded my thinking; because I have forgotten how blessed I have been my entire life...and how overwhelmed I should feel by all of those blessings, everyday. Physical, spiritual, emotional, relational blessings overflow my life.
"...you could easily come to believe life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. What I'm saying is I think life is staggering and we're just used to it. We all are like spoiled children no longer impressed with the gifts we're given - it's just another sunset, just another rainstorm moving over the mountain, just another child being born, just another funeral...
...If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically, into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beauty of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you."
---A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller
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