Okay, raise your hand if you’ve ever come out of Walmart and forgotten where your car is parked.
C’mon, raise ’em high. I’ve seen you. In fact, I’ve been you.
What is it about that parking lot? No matter how hard I try to remember where my car is, I come out of that store befuddled and lost as a goose. Even when I consciously try to remember that my car is lined up with the big “W” or the little “t” on the sign, by the time I hit the lot, my neurotransmitters have sputtered out.
And so begins the Walmart Waltz, as I weave and glide around the lot with my cart looking for my silver Highlander. It’s small consolation that I’m rarely alone on the dance floor. It just means that a lot of us have issues.
I think that maybe the rows used to be numbered, but not anymore. I wonder if Walmart employees get together to watch the security surveillance videos and chuckle at people like me.
Disney World got it right and it’s a good thing or my family would probably still be roaming around the fringes of the Magic Kingdom. They name their lots after Disney characters and number each row. I only have to remember “Goofy-3” or “Pluto-9” and I’m set.
It’s not so easy at Walmart.
Something about that store sucks out my brain cells. Maybe it’s dodging the turbocharged seniors who cruise the aisles on shopping scooters; or walking a half-marathon because my shopping list isn’t efficiently organized; or running into every friend who lives within a three-county radius; or being rebuked by a self-scanning checkout robot who loudly, repeatedly, and wrongly asserts that I haven’t placed my stuff in the bag. I don’t know how to make it any more in the bag than it already is, but the robot continues to chide me.
If I might digress, let me explain why I use the self-checkout line. It’s because as a child, I thought that being a grocery store checkout lady would be the coolest job ever. Before scanners were invented, checkout ladies had to have fingers as speedy and nimble as brain surgeons. It seemed like a high calling.
My career path never included operating a cash register, so self-checkout lines are as close as I can get to that childhood dream.
But back to my point: the whole Walmart experience generally renders my brain so numb that when I emerge, I scarcely know what planet I’m on, let alone where my car is.
“Let’s see … was it by the garden center or the optometrist? Was my parking space slanted in towards the store or away from it? Was moss growing on the north side of that lightpost? Where is the North star from here?”
Fuggedaboutit – I’m lost and all I can do is start roaming. The waltz begins.
I’ve noticed that some people wander through life the way I wander through the Walmart parking lot. They wander and wonder, “What’s my purpose? Where am I going? What’s true?”
They line themselves up with something, or anything, to get their bearings–money, social status, professional success, sensual pleasure.
But when crises occur (and they always do), that “thing” they’ve used for comfort and purpose is no help at all.
I’ve been there, done that, and it’s a bad feeling. Then I lined myself up with just one thing, one Person – Jesus Christ — and my wandering days were over.
I once was lost, but now am found …
Found is so much better. At Walmart, but even more in life.
“Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in.” – Hebrews 12:2a (The Message paraphrase)