Faith in Everyday Life: God in the Grocery Store

God became flesh on a Tuesday.

That's not in the text, exactly. But John 1:14 tells us the Word became flesh and dwelt among us — and dwelling is an ordinary thing. It means groceries. It means traffic. It means the neighbor whose music is too loud and the coworker whose email arrived at 11 PM. Incarnation doesn't just mean a manger in Bethlehem. It means God decided that the stuff of ordinary life was worth showing up for.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: if God moved into the neighborhood — our neighborhood, the messy, fluorescent-lit, crowded neighborhood of human life — then where have we been looking?

If God moved into the neighborhood, our messy, fluorescent-lit neighborhood of human life — then where have we been looking?

By the end of our liturgy on Sunday, I always feel God. The Eucharist does something in me — every time, without fail. But then Monday comes. And Tuesday. And the feeling doesn't always travel.

Which is what got me started paying attention somewhere else entirely. I think about this when I'm at the grocery store.

Not the cathedral. Not during the Eucharist. The grocery store — with the carts that pull left, and the checkout line that's always longer than you planned, and the person ahead of you fumbling for their rewards card while you're already running late.

That's where I've started asking the question. Not as a spiritual exercise — just as a slow habit of attention. What if God is here, too?

Not in spite of the ordinary. In it.

The Scandal of the Ordinary

The early church fought hard over the Incarnation. There were plenty of people who found it more elegant to believe that Jesus only appeared to be human — that God wouldn't really stoop to sweat and hunger and the indignity of needing sleep. It seemed more dignified that way.

The church said: no. What God did in Jesus was not a costume. It was a commitment.

The Word became flesh — not a projection, not a symbol, not a divine guest appearance. Flesh. The same flesh that gets tired and hungry and stands in checkout lines.

This is what theologians call the scandal of particularity. God didn't become humanity in the abstract. God became a specific person, in a specific place, eating specific meals with specific people — many of whom were considered the wrong kind of people to be eating with.

That specificity is not a limitation of the Incarnation. It is its entire point.

And it has teeth. Because if God chose to dwell among the poor, the sick, the outcast — if Jesus spent his time with the people polite society had written off — then Incarnation is not just a warm theological idea. It is a challenge to every instinct we have to look away from suffering, to stay in our lane, to keep the sacred safely separate from the inconvenient.

God loves the particular. God enters the ordinary. And if that's true of God, it changes everything about how we move through our days — including who we bother to see.

A Different Kind of Attention

The mystic Simone Weil wrote that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. She wasn't talking about mindfulness apps. She was talking about the kind of full, unhurried presence we almost never give — to each other, to the moment, to God.

Most of us move through our days on autopilot. We're present in body and somewhere else entirely in mind — running the list, rehearsing the argument, dreading the meeting. The grocery store is somewhere we pass through, not somewhere we arrive.

But what if we did arrive?

What if the person ahead of us fumbling for their card was not an obstacle to our schedule — but a human being, made in the image of God, having a day we know nothing about? What if the tired checkout clerk whose name is on a little badge deserved to be seen — really seen — for thirty seconds?

What if the ordinary was charged with the presence of the One who made it all?

The Incarnation didn't end at the resurrection. It opened something. God is still here, still dwelling, still present in the flesh-and-blood stuff of our days.

This is not magical thinking. It is incarnational thinking — the logical conclusion of what we confess every Sunday.

The Incarnation didn't end at the resurrection. It opened something. The Spirit is poured out. The Body of Christ is still in the world — still us, the church, flesh and blood, carrying the presence of God into every ordinary place we go.

Which means the grocery store is not outside the reach of the sacred. Nothing is.

What Does it Mean on a Tuesday?

I'm not asking us to turn errands into a spiritual performance. I'm not suggesting we hold hands with strangers in the produce section. I'm asking something smaller and stranger than that.

What if we carried the question with us — loosely, lightly — as we moved through our days? Not: where is God in this grand moment? But: where is God in this one?

What if we let the Incarnation do what it was always meant to do — not pull us out of ordinary life, but consecrate it?

Because here's what I keep coming back to: Jesus didn't spend most of his ministry in the Temple. He spent it on roads, at tables, in fishing boats, at wells, in the middle of crowds and funerals and dinner parties. He was always on his way somewhere, always stopping for someone, always finding the holy in the middle of the human.

And the people who encountered him there — not in the Temple, but on the road — are the ones who walked away changed.

That is still where he meets us. On the road. In the store. In the car. In the middle of an ordinary Tuesday that looks like nothing — until you look closer.

So go to the grocery store.

Go with the distracted mind and the long list and the cart that pulls left.

But go there as someone who believes that God has already arrived.

That the person ahead of you is made in the image of God.

That the ordinary is the place God chose — and keeps choosing.

That nothing in your day is outside the reach of grace.

Nothing.

Not even this.

FOR REFLECTION THIS WEEK

Choose one ordinary errand or routine this week — the grocery store, the commute, the lunch break. Before you begin, take one breath and ask: where might I notice God here? You don't need to find an answer. Just ask the question, and pay attention.

Grace and peace,

Father Lee+

Next in this series: Sabbath Is Not a Day Off

What does it mean to truly rest — not as leisure, but as resistance? We'll explore the Episcopal tradition of Sabbath and why it matters more than ever in a world that never stops.