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We all know that grocery shopping with your kids is a wee
stressful, right? But what about
shopping at good ol’ Market Basket…with your kids…9 months pregnant…on a
weekend…a few days before a holiday? If
you are a Market Basket patron then you know what I’m talking about and you
likely just started sweating (sorry).
Well this was my exact scenario this past Thanksgiving. Shopping with my 2 kids and another one on
the way, carrying a list a mile long, squeezing by (i.e. belly bumping) fellow patrons, while opening groceries along the way to keep the
kids happy. We were doing pretty good
until about aisle 10 – and that’s when things started getting dicey with the
onset of bickering, fussing and mama sweating that would naturally accompany a
scenario such as this. We suffered
through the crazy long check-out lines, paid more money than I had planned and
high-tailed it out of there, to the tunes of the kids’ fussing that they didn’t
earn their twenty-five cent vending toy reward.
Ugh – I’m exhausted just remembering this!
Well it got worse.
After loading the fussing kids into the car and unloading the groceries
(while feeling the anxious eyes of the driver behind me waiting for my parking
spot), I looked down and realized I forgot to pay for the pack of toilet paper
at the bottom of my cart. My enormous
belly was obviously to blame, blocking my view of the item, therefore resulting in me forgetting to put it through the check-out.
A moment like this called for a deep breath and little
prayer. What to do? What to do?
Should I just leave it on the cart since I hadn’t paid for it, and let
it get re-shelved when they return the carts to the store? No – we sort of needed this sanitary
essential at home. Do I just take it
home and promise to pay for it the next time I shop there? No – that would be
stealing. Oh how I was so very tempted to
do this…so very tempted.
I unloaded the fussing kids and told them we had to go back into the store to pay for an item I
forgot. They instantly replied that we
should just forget it, take it, that no one would know. And that’s when one of those precious
parenting moments was before me. When I
could forget all about the crazy shopping experience – forgive all the crying
and fussing - and share one of God’s
most basic commandments, “Thou shall not
steal” (Exodus 20:15). Telling them quite
simply that if we took it, that would be stealing. That even
if the store didn’t know or ever find out, that God would. That being honest and telling the truth is
essential.
They didn’t hear me right away. They didn’t want to go back into the
store. That anxious driver was
definitely a wee annoyed that I wasn’t exiting my spot just yet. But in that moment I knew we were doing right
and simply prayed that my kids would remember this moment. I know
I will.
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