A New Perspective On Carrots

I ran out of carrots last night.

What’s the big deal with that?  Most of the time, many of us would pick up our cell phone and ask Honey to stop by the store on the way home from work.  Or we would jump in the car, formulating a list of what else we might need in the next two weeks as we insert the key into the ignition.

It’s not that my husband and I are hurting financially. The problem is, I don’t drive.  My husband, recovering from surgery, is still on prescription pain meds and shouldn’t be driving.  With an eleven degree wind chill, it’s a bit too cold to walk the half mile to our small town grocer. And no, I’m not calling a neighbor to take me to the store for a bag of carrots.

As I open my refrigerator and see my dwindling food supply, the temptation is to fret.  When am I going to get to the store next?  Will we have enough before I can? Oh no, we have ONLY one gallon of milk and ONE dozen eggs left . . .

When I put steaming plates of pork green chili stew that contained my one remaining carrot, accompanied by an apple celery salad on our table last night, I felt shame.  We still had food.  Plenty of food. One friend told a private group via email the day before that her financial straits were so dire, there was NO food for her family that night.  We may not have carrots but we still have other veggies, meat in the freezer, plenty of bread and the ingredients to make more, and coffee in the canister.  I have not yet begun to be creative with my meal planning.

Even if I was to the point of invention out of necessity, I have no need to worry.  It would be just like my God to send someone to my doorstep saying, “I found this good deal on carrots and bought too much – can you use a bag?” Sounds incredulous?  Stuff like that has happened before.  Maybe not with carrots, but with eggs and apples and corn on the cob.  When we’ve been low on meat and prices were high, I’ve stumbled on advertised deals and reduced for quick sale prices that just should not have been.  Then there is the time my four year old daughter prayed for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and the next day, when the grocery flyer arrived, Mac and Cheese was advertised at the lowest price I had seen it in months.

God will take care of us – in some pretty creative ways too. I’m confident of that.

What bothers me about this whole bag of carrots scenario is the point at which I began to worry.  I realized that I am a product of my over-indulged culture.  We have such easy access to so much that we are caught off guard when we can’t have all that we want at the moment we want it. We have forgotten that we can get along fine when we have to do without. And God in his grace, puts up with so much of our whining and sniveling and fretting, providing for us in abundance anyway.

God forgive me!

So last night, as we bowed our heads over that bowl of stew, I was a lot more grateful in my prayer of thanks.  Instead of wondering when I would get to the store next, I was thankful that in spite of not being able to get to the store for over a week, I still had food, plenty of food, to feed my husband and me. Somehow, supper tasted a lot better than usual.  It was one of those rare moments that I didn’t take my meal for granted.

Now, don’t any of you go buying me a bag of carrots, you hear?  For once, doing without carrots is good for me.