A Mango For Your Thoughts

I learned a valuable lesson while at the grocery store the other day. It came to me by way of a mango mistake in the produce section. Upon noticing a sale on mangos and the onset of the flu I had to get multiple mangos for the vitamin C. In my hurried hysteria I grabbed the juiciest of tropical green goodness and delicately placed them all into one produce baggie. As I twisted it closed to place into my cart the entire bag ripped and the mangos, five of them, all broke loose from the bag quicker and louder than students busting loose from school for the summer. They crashed into my cart, clattering about as they knocked over cans of soup and the rest of my flu survival kit items.

In a graceful, and refined way, I glided across the shiny linoleum floor of the produce section away from the loud racket much like that of orchestrated choreography seen in an episode of Dancing with the Stars. As my ballroom routine came to a close I looked around to see if anyone had seen what I had done and just as I came to, I noticed a woman pushing her cart down the aisle that dead ended into where I was.

"Nice one," she called out as she applauded my blunder. "We've all done that before."

"Agreed. We've all done it," chimed in another lady from the other side of the fruit aisle. "But nicely done to come back from it."

Through the next three days of laying on the couch that scene kept playing out and got me thinking:

How often do we try to pile in too much into our day, our week, into our life and yes into our plastic produce bags, only too just have everything come undone and end up crashing down on us? Whether it's pushing ourselves too hard and we become ill or we hold in so much stress and anxiety only to just freak out. We all have fallen victim to such an unfortunate break.

We forget to just take things three seconds at a time. We tone out advice from scholars that remind us to "simplify, simplify, simplify." We ignore that "the ill-tempered stir up strife, but the patient settle disputes (Proverbs 15:18)" or that we are called to "rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer (Romans 12:12)."

For me, it took mangos gracefully interrupting a couple shopper's midday grocery experience with a produce dance party and three days of laying on the couch to think about it. Next time I'll know not to shove too much into such cheap plastic, but also the next time that I'm filled with a quirky concoction of emotions - at work, when life throws down the hammer or if I'm struggling with five large mangos - I can be that sea of calm in a storm of chaos. Unfortunately it took unplanned mango madness and a bit of humility for me to learn this lesson.