Shopping
I spent many hours today Christmas shopping with my wife. Our family split up into two teams – my oldest, my youngest, and the grandbaby went one way and my wife and I went the other way. After about 3 hours of shopping, my wife said, “you’re doing very well today”, knowing how much I hate shopping and also recognizing that during those 3 hours I didn’t really say one word that would have shown any displeasure or discomfort on my part at all!Â
We spent all 3 hours at WalMart, and in those 3 hours, we had found about 80% of the gifts we needed, had lunch with our son (who works at WalMart), and had decided which other stores we needed to visit in order to finish out our shopping for the day. After dropping off the first round of bags at home, we finished our shopping 2 hours later after visiting both Best Buy and Barnes & Noble.
As much as I dislike shopping, I must admit that for some reason today was different. Maybe it was the lunch. Maybe it was the feeling of finality as I knew that the gift list was rapidly shrinking. Maybe it was because I spent all afternoon poking fun at my wife. Maybe it was because I focused on both the spiritual and the personal side of my assessment today. Could be any or all of these, but amazingly, I truly enjoyed spending this day shopping with my wife.