I Went Grocery Shopping Yesterday

It made me think how blessed most of us are in the United States and other developed countries.

I watched people pondering the shelves to decide which kind of an item they wanted. Some were choosing by price, others by reading the labels, others just having difficulty deciding which to choose.

I thought first about people living in places where they didn't have a choice. If they wanted a particular kind of item, and they could find any of that kind of item, there was only one to choose from. And I thought about people who just didn't have the money to buy the item, any item.

There are people who live places in the world where there are no stores and no grocery items to buy. They may be able to find produce in a market, but there are no foods already prepared, canned, or frozen. And meat often is very limited or not available at all. They might buy live fowl. (Personally, I wouldn't know what to do with a live fowl and am grateful I don't have to learn!)

I'm able to buy all the grocery items we need and even some we don't need but just want. I'm terribly grateful for that fact. There has been a time in my life when that wasn't true, a time when I had to really carefully budget what little money I had to feed myself and two children. At one point I got food stamps, enough to buy milk for a month but that's all. So these days I relish grocery shopping. I'm still careful not to spend too much, but we don't go without now.

Yesterday I watched a woman in the over-the-counter pharmacy aisle trying to decide on a medicine. I know there are people in our country who can't even afford to buy Tylenol. And there are parts of the world where they can't get any kind of medicines. How very blessed we are when we can so easily buy something for an ache or pain.

And even though I have health and disability issues, I was able to do my own shopping because  I had the luxury of shopping with an electric cart. Imagine. I don't even have to be able to walk for the hour that it takes to shop! But something in the cereal aisle made me find something more for which to be even more thankful. I turned my electric cart into the cereal aisle and there was a team of emergency medics tending to someone lying on the floor!

I was grateful that even with my health issues I wasn't experiencing an emergency on the floor of a store. And even more grateful that there are people trained to come to help in emergencies when they are needed. We have 911 and other emergency systems that come quickly when they are needed. Imagine being somewhere that there are no trained medical persons when you need emergency care. There are many people who live long distances from that kind of help. And there are countries where that kind of help is just not there at all. There are places in the world where there are no doctors, no medicine, no hospitals, nothing. Even if we never have to use the emergency services, we are blessed to have them available.

So my trip to the grocery store has me all set for Thanksgiving Day. There is just so much for which we have to be thankful.