Friends have asked me how I decide what I am going to write about every day. Sometimes ideas swirl around in my head for a while. Sometimes I sit down to write about something and for some reason, my blog becomes about something all together different than what I had planned to write about that morning. I keep journals, and notebooks, and bookmarked pages of books that I like. I write mostly from my experiences, all 47 years of them. When I think of something interesting to write about, I jot down the idea in a notebook. Sometimes I have an idea of what I am going to write about and then a life experience happens that tells me that this experience is what I really need to write about. Yesterday afternoon I had one of those experiences.
I go to my local grocery store a lot. I have a big family. When all of our kids were still at home and three of them were teen-aged boys, my grocery store was my “home away from home.” Our grocery bill was right under the cost of our mortgage payment every month. So yesterday, I was at my grocery store AGAIN and I got to chatting with the cashier. She had on a beautiful pair of earrings. They looked exotic. They were dangles. The earrings that she wore were discs with an intricate silver and dark blue design. They were truly lovely. I told the cashier how much I liked them. She said, “Thank you. A customer gave them to me.”
Now at this point, I got introspective. I started thinking about the fact that I, myself, hadn’t ever really given anything to a cashier who waited on me, except maybe a smile. I think that there was one time when I had already opened a bag of M&Ms in the store and my cashier mentioned that she had been on a double shift and had not eaten any lunch, so I told her to hold out her hand for some of my M&Ms. That has been the extent of my giving to any store personnel waiting on me, so I admit that I was amazed and curious. Luckily, she continued with the story.
“I complimented my customer’s earrings and my customer mentioned that she had gotten them on a special trip to Jordan. When I was finished with the transaction, my customer removed her earrings quickly and clasped them into my hand. She said that someone had blessed her that day and that it was her turn to pay it forward,” is how the cashier explained it to me. The cashier then said that she was so shocked and so surprised that she really didn’t have much time to thank the lady who was already well on her way out of the store. The cashier then went on to tell me that when she tells that story to the many people who have complimented her earrings, they have jokingly suggested that she should pass on the earrings to them as a blessing. At that point, I told my cashier, “I LOVE, LOVE those earrings!!”
She knew that I was kidding and we laughed together. I told her (while I was admittedly a little touched and misty) that the gift that she is passing on, is the telling of that wonderful, inspiring, warmhearted story. I told her that I think that this is the way that the Universe works, using “angels on Earth.” She said that the earrings came at a time that she had been kind of downhearted and really needed to be lifted up and that she saw them as a gift sent to her by God. The cashier told me that she wears those earrings almost every single day.
People are mostly good. There are small miracles happening around us every day if we make the point of looking around for them. We have the capacity to be other people’s “angels on Earth” if we ask to be lead. We all have these special stories that have happened to us just at the moment that we needed them to happen. I’m so grateful for the reminder that I got of all of that goodness that surrounds us, just from my simple, routine stop for a gallon of milk at my local grocery store.