Shopping Experience

Im a very head heavy person; I am still learning the art of listening and speaking from the heart and also the balance between the two. 

Recently I was confronted with one of my hardest daily challenges of shopping…… I know, I know for a lot of people this is fun, easy and one might even say there is a beauty in it. For me however, its far from this even to the point I often at times think the opposite … if I ever need anything then I will just go to the one shop and obtain that item. I normally never find myself confronted with a list of items to get in a period of time. So for the coming travels that is just what has happened, a list of items to get in a given time frame. 

My approach at first was to have my list clearly defined into items labelled down to every element, - item, color, fabric type, style, size, even washing machine friendly…. So this will take all other decisions away just need to find that single item in a shop… how hard can this be!?! I discovered hard, like finding a needle in a hay stack, then on discovering the item I realized that actually I got it wrong and didn't want that fabric stated on the list, I wanted a mix blend so the process started again. After a few hours with no success I was back to the start again, frustrated at the level of hardest for something that seems to others to be so simple therefore I started to ponder on a new approach to take to get to my goal. 

Apart of me does not want to learn the art of shopping, it doesn't interest me in the slightest yet at the same time i do not want anyone to do it for me, after all I possibly think this is how I got into this situation not having knowledge or practical skill in the first instance…. I take the approach the Lord will provide and often he has with random offers of clothes for gardening, a skirt from different people, plus my sister gives me clothes bless her heart and so forth. So no deep desire to learn it plus it takes away that little chance that I would ever use shopping, or material items as something to pull me away from the Lord. Yet I completely understand that we need to shop … Supermarket shopping is another thing; in recent months going to the supermarket taking in all the different information, admittedly at times feeling like information overload, I think it has started to show promising signs - like who knew there was different types of mushrooms some more rare than others, or different potatoes for different cooking means, plus sugar is not actually bad like sodium can be so have to check those levels, plus the place its bottled might be different for the place where product grown which does have importance…. lets not get started on washing powder though……. 

As I reflect on the shopping experience I connect this back to spiritual approaches we each take, I guess its easy to fall into the trap of thinking that memorizing scripture will be a great way to carry the word with us wherever we go, to have God breathed truth, instruction and reproof in our hearts and minds as we live for him each day. Yet just memorizing some words on pages will make no difference just like writing a list with items clearly define, we are all given choices for a reason and its up to each one of us to make the decision which is right for each one of us - after all we are unique and there is no one size fits all ;o)