Strange Checklist for Shopping

Well, why wouldn’t they notice? I pushed my shopping cart into the store with an egg carton and an empty applesauce jar. Nobody would really notice anything unusual about a closed egg carton, but it was empty as well. Nobody gave me any sort of odd stare, as people hardly notice anything about anyone these days. Just a casual glance before they looked away and went about their other business.

Not too many people would take these things into a store unless they were up to something. This was the case for me. The egg carton and applesauce jar were my shopping list. My task was simple: just get a jar of applesauce and a carton with a dozen eggs. How straightforward could it be?

You would be amazed how many brands of applesauce you can find in a grocery store! I located the right brand, and then I matched the size of the empty jar in my cart. That was simple enough. I had my hands on the right brand, right size jar. Once it went into the cart, I was ready to approach the eggs.

Oh, but wait! There’s more! I had a jar of “ORIGINAL” applesauce in my hand, and was about to put it into my cart next to the empty jar marked “NATURAL.” It's a safe bet that I was glad for my shopping list! What an embarrassment it would be to go home with mismatched jars.

I almost got caught off guard, but then I was very careful to check out the eggs. That was a snap, since only one kind of carton had the color and markings of the one in my cart. So as soon as I opened the new carton and made sure all the eggs were unbroken, I was ready to go.

At the checkout counter was a final act of humiliation. The checker said, “You were sent here, weren’t you?” She had my number. She knew I didn’t want to disappoint my wife and bring back the wrong merchandise, but she was happy for me that I got it right. Then she put the empty jar and egg carton into my bags and laughed at me as I left.

I returned home and put away the items, leaving the empty containers on the counter for my wife to validate my efforts. All was well.

Good grief! How complicated can it be to get a jar of one brand’s natural applesauce and the right kind of eggs? Aren’t we being too much of a nerd by putting this much effort into getting a very simple thing right? At my age, and with my experience buying groceries, shouldn’t I be able to accomplish a simple task?

In this particular case all of these questions are valid. They are great to ask. But consider this question. How many times do we figure we “got it right” and discover later that we’ve forgotten something?

Have you ever heard of an airplane pilot who forgets to lower the landing gear, and the plane makes a very sickening sound as it scrapes on the runway? The pilot immediately knows that he or she has landed with the wheels up because it takes so much power to taxi. Not only that, the altimeter reads about two feet lower. And the pilot gets to meet a lot of interesting and important people. To add insult to injury, someone takes the landing checklist out of the airplane seat pocket. Sure enough, the checklist has an entry that says “Gear [wheels] down and locked.” The pilot has lots of hours in this type of airplane, knows the controls and procedures by heart, but somehow just didn’t get one of the details right.

I want to assure you that every time you ride on a commercial airline flight, the crew in the cockpit goes over the checklist line by line. And in addition to that, the “black box” (actually, it’s orange) makes a voice recording of the crew members calling out the line items. So your chances of a pilot forgetting simple items such as lowering the landing gear are very slim.

I could take this into the area of tragedy when pets or children are left in a locked car. Now I’m done with this because it’s more serious than I want to get.

Let’s go in the direction of our Bible study. Give me the answers to these questions.

1. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden for eating what?
2. Noah took how many of each type of animal onto the ark? (Yes, it’s Noah. Nobody’s trying to trick you by saying Moses!)
3. Who cut Samson’s hair, causing him to lose his strength?
4. How many Magi went to visit the Christ Child?

Here are the answers.

1. Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden for eating a forbidden fruit, not necessarily an apple.
   Genesis 2:16-17; 3:2, 6, 11
2. Noah took seven pairs of “clean” animals and one pair of the others.
   Genesis 7:2
3. Delilah didn’t cut Samson’s hair. She called a man to cut it while he (Samson, not the nocturnal barber) was sleeping.
   Judges 16:19
4. The Bible doesn’t say how many Magi brought the gold, frankincense, and myrrh when they went to visit the Christ Child.
   Matthew 2:1, 7, 11, 16

See? How many did you get right? Could we do better with our Bible knowledge if we spent more time studying even the things we think we know?

So the next time you see me in a grocery store with a 3-dimensional checklist, maybe there’s madness to my method.

Or maybe there’s method to my madness?

Grace and Peace,
Charles+