I made it to Saver’s, finally, today. Second-hand store shopping is much more my style than mall shopping: it’s one store where you’ll find all the clothes you need for your family at a fraction of the mall prices. So, dragging in my five children and two bags full of unwanted items (but “someone else’s treasure”) in order to get my 20% off discount, I entered the store full of hopes of fun shopping times and finding good deals.
After about an hour of digging through clothes and shoes, we eventually decided to call it quits and headed for the dressing rooms. As soon as we got there a lady exclaimed rather loudly, “Do you have 5 children?!” She apparently was waiting as her daughter tried on clothes.
I let out a sigh-laugh and replied, “Yep!” with a slight smile. Great! I thought. She must have seen how wild my kids were behaving as we meandered our way through the store. Had she seen them playing with nearly every single toy in the toy aisle? Or pick out “pretty” shoes for me in the shoe aisles? Was it her that stopped short as my 2-year-old blindly dashed out in front of her? Perhaps she saw how my children loved to climb underneath and through the clothes on the racks. Did she see them chasing and fighting and getting mad at each other? Or even worse--did she hear me scold them to stop being so loud?
“Well,” the woman was saying as my mind raced through the events of the last hour, “God must have blessed you with more patience than the rest of us.”
In one second all of my “oh no’s” turned into a melted mush as I felt my cheeks get warm—partly from the compliment, and partly from not feeling so patient. “Actually,” I said quietly, “I’m still praying for that one,” and gave her a quick, sincere smile. Every day, actually.
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