INTRO MUSIC
STANDARD INTRO
Okay Caller: My name is Maddie, and I am in my late twenties, and I’m having an experience that is not at all unique, but feels like the whole world when that’s happening. And it’s the experience of reevaluating the belief system in which I was raised. I was raised in a conservative Christian faith, and there were many things that I was taught to do and to not do.
And there was such a language of consequence and blessing attached to these things. And while in my heart I wanted to be good, I was also doing a lot of things to make sure that like bad things wouldn’t happen to me. And this has been just an experience of like re evaluating, like making my own choices and kind of deciding what I believe over the past few years.
And really, things came to a head for me in early 2020 because of personal things that were happening and also community things that were happening. And in 2021, in the spring, I went grocery shopping on a Sunday, which is something that, like, I was raised just to never do. Keeping the Sabbath day holy was really, really important in my religious tradition, and one of the things that we did not do was go grocery shopping on Sunday.
And I felt a little bit bad this day because like I hadn’t needed to go grocery shopping on Sunday. I had just done it because it was more convenient. And as I was bringing my groceries into my house, I dropped my gallon of milk and it broke. And the first thought that came to my mind was This is the consequence for grocery shopping on the Sabbath.
And then the next thought was like, I don’t actually believe that. That’s not what I believe, but like, in my heart, it was hard to not feel that like, childhood shame that I had grown up with. And so I salvaged what I could of the milk. I was like, annoyed that I need to go back and get more. I brought the rest of my groceries in, and as I was doing it, um, a man pulled up in a truck and handed me a gallon of milk because he had seen what had happened.
And I was so surprised and so touched that someone had seen me in this moment of need and given me this gallon of milk and I brought it inside and I put it in the fridge and I looked at the expiration date and I realized that when you buy milk at the store the expiration date is about two weeks out and the expiration date for this milk was like not two weeks out.
There was still plenty of time to use it but it was close enough that I realized this milk must have come from this person’s fridge and it just touched me so much that this person gave me what they had to help me out. And as I told this story to a friend and as I thought about this story, It was so comforting to me that I’d grown up believing that God might punish me for something like grocery shopping on the Sabbath by like, spilling my milk, but in reality what had happened was someone had shown up for me, and that no matter what I believed about if there was a God and the powers of the universe, that I can believe in us, and I can believe in the way that we take care of each other, And I think that’s really special and really divine, no matter who you are, no matter what you believe that we’re here for each other.
And even when things are bigger than that go wrong, even when other things happen, it’s the people that are usually my okay thing. So thanks so much, Nora. Love this show so much and so happy to learn about other people’s okay things. Have a great day. Bye.
OUTRO MUSIC
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