Almost thirty years ago, I had a baby less than a year old and another on the way. I stayed home with him in our two-bedroom apartment while my husband worked a full-time job, and we tried to scrape together enough for a downpayment on a house. Money was tight, and I tried to be frugal with our grocery budget, at least as frugal as you can be buying diapers, baby wipes, and baby formula. My husband asked me to pick up a six-pack of beer on one trip to the store, and I remember mentally calculating what I was going to have to cut to buy him this once-in-a-while indulgence.
It was getting dark when I parked our car, a 1984 Dodge 600 convertible with a duct-taped canvas top, and started walking into the store. In the cart corral, one cart caught my eye. A 12-pack of beer was still in the bottom, apparently forgotten and left behind. Looks like this was meant for me, I thought, as I loaded the beer into my car and then headed back to the store. As I approached the door, a woman stopped me. “Did you by chance see a 12-pack of beer left in the cart corral?” she asked. When I hesitated, she added, “I understand. It’s OK if you took it. But I’d like it back.”
I nodded, and she followed me to my car. “I’m sorry,” I told her as I handed her the beer. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. But I did worry about it, and some part of me still thinks about it to this day.
You see, that evening I was confronted by my shadow, that part of each of us that can fully justify doing things that we would not consider doing if we were living out of the values we say we believe. I justified my theft of the beer by thinking it was providential since money was tight. If you asked me before the beer incident if I valued honesty, I would have assured you that I did. But when confronted with my dishonest choice to take the beer rather than turning it in at the store lost and found, I realized in that moment that I wasn’t living from my values. It made me consider how many other times I thought I was living authentically, and instead, I was fooling myself.
I’m grateful and humbled, encouraged and embarrassed, by what happened in that store parking lot. Being confronted by your shadow isn’t pleasant. It’s holding up a mirror to you and showing you who you are, not who you think you are. But it also can be transformative, changing you deeply in ways that only great pain or great love can.
Photo courtesy of Kuhlens Photography