Speak to Me Sunday: Spiritual Promptings

On this rainy morning, the third Sunday of Advent, I made a New Year’s Resolution. And it stemmed from a chance encounter in the Christmas aisle in Target.

Last week I took a deep breath and went to Target around lunchtime. Not the best time during this time of year. As I wandered the Christmas aisles, several times I crossed paths with a mother with two toddlers in a shopping cart. The mother looked harried while the toddlers behaved just how you would imagine toddlers would act at lunchtime: they were loud, whiney, and periodically threw things out of the shopping cart. The mother picked things up from the ground, told them to stop, and gave them a fruit snack, all while trying to shop. The whining and pushing worsened.

At one point I heard her whisper fiercely to her children that they’d better sit their “asses down” or else.

Listening from one aisle over, I was equal parts horrified (the cursing) and bemused (I remember those days), but quickly settled more on horrified. Who uses that language with such young children?  I mean, how horrible! The drama from the shopping cart escalated. I saw an elderly lady roll her eyes, and another customer grew exasperated as she maneuvered her cart around the chaos.

It was at this moment I realized how the problem was not with the young mother and her children, but with how Grinch-like the rest of us were behaving—judging, assuming and, yes, mom-shaming.

I then felt a spiritual prompting. I remembered the $5 Starbucks gift card in my wallet, and this is what I thought I should do: find the woman, commiserate how we have all had “those days” with our children and that things do get better. I could tell her how my two older boys once got into a scuffle at the checkout lane. I could say, “Here, from one mom to another, have a cup of coffee on me.”

That was what I felt prompted to do, but by nature I am not an impulsive person. I live in my head. Sometimes too much. By the time I acted on the spiritual prompting, the woman and her children had disappeared. I wandered around the store looking for them, but they were gone.

I had missed an opportunity to change the course of someone’s day.

Several times this week I sat down to write about this episode but was not sure what I wanted to say. Don’t judge, maybe. Offer some grace, perhaps.

Then, as I reread my clumsy attempts to put the episode into words, I recognized the heart of the story: spiritual promptings are a call to do something more, something bigger than we may be comfortable doing which, for me, means recognizing when to get out of my head. And out of my comfort zone. After all, a spiritual prompt is more than a thought. It is a gentle nudge to spur us into action with the knowledge that God does not call the trained, he trains the called.

And this is why, on a rainy third Sunday of Advent, I made a New Year’s resolution.