grocery cart epiphany
by JVS on Sep.29, 2008, under 2008
Walking the other day, I was, once again, thinking about how to better wake up to my life. I don’t want it to pass by in a blur. I want each day, each moment to be alive; to be filled with eternity. Nearing my home, I saw an older Filipina woman struggling across the street…
She was trying to pull a fully loaded grocery pull cart up over a curb. (You know those carts that people sometimes use. I used one when I delivered newspapers as a kid. Looking back I was pretty good at manipulating my overloaded charge).
Anyway I notice this lady struggling, and my conscience whispers, “Help her.” A day earlier I’d attended a university lecture where a Cambridge professor spoke of how God’s Spirit impresses an “imperceptible persuasion on our wills.” Sometimes the voice of conscience and the Holy Spirit’s whispers seem synonymous. Whenever this happens my first reaction is to squelch that voice; ignore it. Slowly I’m learning how not to do this. So I crossed the street and offered to help.
Her groceries weighed a ton. Her load was way beyond her axle limit. No sooner had I gone half a block, two of the cart’s four wheels disintegrated. The woman looked at me and said, “That’s what I was worried about. They were starting to go.” I tilted the cart on an angle and pulled it the rest of the way home. “She’d never have been able to do this,” I thought.
Walking that last block we talked a bit (as much as she was willing to talk with a total stranger). Within two minutes she’d told me about her ongoing breast cancer treatments. The cancer had come back and moved into her lymph nodes, now disabling her right arm. Only then did I notice that her arm was in a sling underneath her coat.
Deeply moved, all I could think was, “What if I didn’t come over?”
Within a few minutes I’d lifted the cart up into the foyer of her modest townhome. “Do you have someone to care for you,” I asked. She said she had a couple of children (they were at work at the moment). Then she thanked me and I headed home; shaken… fully awake.
I’m still wondering if I should buy her a new cart. I keep imagining one with big all-terrain wheels and a heavy duty axle.
