Truths, Half-truths, and Sea Stories

On the way home from lunch with friends today,  we stopped at COSTCO to pick up a few things.  While I enjoy our Sunday routine,  it is often at odds with how I spend the first part of my day.    As you may know, if you have followed either of my blogs for any length of time,  my wife and I are active members of our church.  For the last decade at least, one  or both of us serve as ushers for our worship service.   For the last five years,  I have been leading the ushers every Sunday for four to six months every year.  And that has helped me to overlook in others the shortcomings we all share.  In biblical parlance – sin.   Greed. Pride. Lust.  Et cetera.  On display at Costco.

“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
― Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

Not that I am immune to “human weakness” by any means.   It’s why I go to church, why I pray and why I depend on the divine to help me when I’m weak.    See if my observations sound like anything you have seen:

1. The bored clerk helping at checkout who seems genuinely irritated that a customer wants a box to carry out their purchases.
2. The seven customers waiting in the parking lot behind the man waiting for a particular spot though there are two people pulling out a hundred feet away.
3. The line of customers congregating around one of the sample stations – sausage, I think – blocking all but the most determined customers from going down the aisle.
4. A wife berating a husband because he wants to buy some pickles  while she has a month-supply of chocolate in the cart.
5. Several customers who found a deal – and are buying several bottles of Margarita (premixed) each – though the checkout clerk chuckled to me that Cinco de Mayo is still a month or more off.
6. The woman who blatantly, if smugly sly, gets in front of me – two inches behind the man in line in front of her – and then motions her gal-pal to pull their nearly empty cart in front of us – three bottles of margarita, two of wine and cheese puffs or whatnot.

These are not representative of all, but a sample of people I’ve encountered.   For myself,  I have to hustle past the stadium-sized televisions positioned at the front of the store,  the random trinkets, and past the alcohol, to the steak and roasts.   I love to barbecue, and could easily spend my week with the smoker or barbecue going daily.

I would love to stuff my face with beef jerky, baked goods or those Salted Caramel chocolates, but that’s what I am declaring war on these days. On my new lifestyle- cutting out carbohydrates – I’m 22 pounds less than I weighed at the beginning of January.  And I intend to be twenty-five pounds lighter by the end of the summer.

Please God, help me love people.  Give me humility.  Help me say “no” to the gallon jug of BBQ Sauce to go with the steaks.   And help me with my own weaknesses!