Grocery Store Friends: Cultivate Deeper Relationships
Picture the scene. You’re walking through the grocery store, Target, or wherever you do your shopping on a Saturday afternoon. A woman makes eye contact from down the aisle and walks with purposeful steps toward your basket. In the seconds before she makes contact, you comb through the contact list in your brain trying to place her. Where do I know you from? Before you figure it out, she’s there, showing all her teeth in that wide smile, asking how you’ve been and what the family has been up to.
Your smile isn’t as big as your eyes, noticing first how close she stands to you, as if you’re the best of friends. Don’t stand so close to me. “We’re all doing great,” you reply. “How have you been?” She provides the customary response in return to your inquiry, assuring you the kids are all doing wonderfully at college, spreading their wings and she’s loving having an empty house again. As soon as the interaction began, it’s over, and you still can’t figure out where you met this woman. You continue on your way heading for the tomato sauce aisle, chuckling to yourself and knowing you’ll see her again next Saturday, same time, same place.
Maybe your person is the cashier who always rings up your items with whom you make idle chit-chat, or the mom that lives down the street who you’ve never talked to for longer than five minutes. We see them in passing like clockwork, but we don’t know the first thing about them. We call these people grocery store friends, as a friend from Bible study dubbed them. She explained these are people we hold at arm’s length, who only see the version of us we take to the store—the one prepared to face a judgmental public arena—just a glimpse of you passing by in the story of your life.
Stick To The Shallows
Since becoming a mother I’ve grown much more comfortable running into Target in leggings with no makeup, but those are the days I hope I don’t see anyone I know. Even if our intent isn’t clear, we don’t enter situations hoping for judgment to fall upon us in the shifting, narrowed glance of a stranger, much less someone we know. How do we avoid the harsh eyes of a stranger? We present the highlight reel of our life, much like you find on social media. When we’re asked, “How are you?” we blurt out the response that will end the conversation fastest. We don’t offer up the weird headaches that just won’t leave or that the baby hasn’t slept through the night since he was born two years ago. All the baggage creaking and clanking on the tile floor behind us is shoved to the side. Out of sight, out of mind.
‘Grocery Store Friends’ is a nice way of naming the thing we do when we try with all we have to avoid admitting our problems to people in public, especially when they didn’t choose to enter the conversation. We call it polite and courteous to keep the troubles of our lives to ourselves, rather than pitching them over the laundry line, hanging them out for all to see. After all, I don’t want to be the weeping woman on aisle seven because someone asked how my son was sleeping through the night. The truth of the matter is we’re using a coping mechanism to keep people as ‘friends’ without letting them get too close.
Move Into The Deep End
When God becomes like a grocery store friend , it means I only see Him in passing and when we do meet there’s never a depth to our conversation. I never open myself up to reveal the hurting and broken pieces within. Perhaps the reason we keep God relegated to a grocery store friend, repeating to ourselves that we don’t need His help, is we feel like we should have better handle on things by now. We shouldn’t need God’s help with this miniscule problem. How can we let God—who holds the entire world inside one outstretched palm—see us in this big mess of a life? Letting Him see it, baring our whole heart to Him feels like running naked in the street. It’s too vulnerable, too risky.
Keeping a six-foot separation between Jesus and our heart prevents Him from truly abiding there. It puts up a barrier at the doorway declaring NO TRESPASSERS, blocking His way to inhabiting our heart and transforming it into a new creation. I know from personal experience the problem can also lie in our ignorance. We desire a deeper relationship with God, but we simply don’t know how to build it. You’ve heard all the typical Christian answers, like quiet time, reading devotionals, being out in creation, but you can’t seem to find the one that fits your personality best.
The biggest roadblock for you might be fear. You’ve seen the transformation Jesus catalyzes in other people’s lives. You’ve seen the changes they made; how different they are now. It seems scary and painful to let go of so much you’ve already established in your life for one man they say is God. I’ll point you to my decision-making mentor, Emily P. Freeman, for this part: don’t let fear push you around or into doing things you aren’t comfortable doing. Instead, let love lead you forward, one gentle step after another.
I remember sitting down with Jesus at my teeny-tiny kitchen table in my college apartment. We’d been grocery store friends for a long time, saying hi to each other on Sundays, but even that had waned in recent years. Opening His word felt like opening my soul up to scrutiny I wasn’t ready for, so I started small. One short devotional and a very quickly uttered prayer. That one miniscule step of obedience is all it took for Jesus to light the flame of faith within me, and lay the groundwork for the mighty oak of our relationship to sprout from newly tilled earth, green baby leaves moving on the breeze.
