Yes, I am making appearances in Wal-Mart again. This morning, I woke up to rain on my skylights. So I drug myself out of bed and put on my rainboots and happy face and waited for Troy to get home from prayer group. Off we went to the land of (theoretical) lower prices.
We gathered band-aids and water balloons and icing and sugar cookies and Dixie Cups and all manner of various sundry items needed to feed teens and have a VBS for little ones when we travel.
At one point, I put on Facebook that I seemed to have lost my husband in the Wal-Marts on a rainy mornin'... I was the beginning of a bad country song.
We finally got ready to check out but had to wait for the guy with the money. Some story about helping people or maybe the soccer game was really exciting... I dunno, it took a while.
If nothing else, there is plenty-o-people watching to be done in a Wal-Mart, ya know? So we people watched and were entertained, but one guy really caught my attention. He was a Wal-Mart employee. He was cleaning the floors. He had a little cart full of tools -- broom, dust pan, mop, and the most clever contraption EVER!
He stopped to get a scuff mark up. He reached in his cart, gave it a squirt with a squirt bottle. Put the squirt bottle back. Reached in the cart again, drug out a broom handle that had a tennis ball stuck on it and used the tennis ball to scrub the scuff mark. It worked! Drug back out the squirt bottle, squirt! Then mopped heartily and happily.
I'm not kidding about the happily part. Imagine if your job were to clean the floors at Wal-Mart. How would you approach that? This guy was humming LOUDLY. He was so darn happy to have his floor cleaning job. What a great lesson in life. It was a rainy morning. All of us were going to be creating more work for him. Maybe he was extra happy to be using that tennis ball rig of his. Whatever the case, he was happy as he could be.
I'll try to remember that guy next week when I'm on my mission trip scraping paint, standing in mud, or better yet, standing in line at Wal-Mart again.
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
Colossians 3:23, 24
