There is a particular kind of holiness reserved for carrying groceries that are not your own.
It usually begins with good intentions and ends with arms stretched two inches longer than nature intended. Somewhere between the parking lot and the front door, the bags begin to cut into your fingers, the milk tilts at a concerning angle, and the loaf of bread — despite being light as a theological abstraction — manages to slip under your arm and threaten escape.
And yet, this is where theology lives.
Carrying groceries for someone else is not glamorous. There is no ribbon cutting. No parish newsletter article (unless someone like me writes one). No one sings the Doxology as you negotiate the final step onto the porch. It is, however, deeply incarnational. God-with-us shows up most reliably when hands are full and backs are slightly bent.
In the Gospels, Jesus does not float six inches above the ground dispensing wisdom like a divine podcast. He walks dusty roads. He eats other people’s food. He notices who is tired, who is hungry, and who is standing alone near the shelves of life wondering how they’ll manage. Carrying groceries for someone else is theology with elbows. It is doctrine with sore wrists.
There is also humility involved. You cannot carry someone else’s groceries with dignity. You must accept the awkward shuffle, the bag that suddenly tears, the banana that makes a break for freedom. Love, it turns out, is rarely tidy. It leaks milk.
What matters is not the weight of the bags but the direction you are walking. Toward someone. Toward their door. Toward their ordinary, everyday need. This is how the Church moves best — not always in grand processions, but in small, steady steps with reusable bags cutting into our palms.
And here’s the miracle: when you carry groceries for someone else, you almost always discover that you are the one fed. Fed with gratitude, yes — but also with the quiet knowledge that God still trusts us with one another’s needs.
The Kingdom of God, it seems, arrives not only in bread and wine at the altar, but in eggs, soup, and slightly bruised apples carried carefully up the steps.
If you’re looking for a place to practice theology this week, don’t start with a library. Start with the car. Look for someone whose hands are already full. Then pick up a bag.
That’s incarnational love. Heavy, holy, and entirely worth it.
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A Companion Prayer
Gracious God,
who carried our humanity with patience and love,
give us eyes to notice the quiet needs around us
and hands willing to be inconvenienced for the sake of mercy.
Teach us to carry what is heavy for others,
knowing that in doing so,
we walk the same road your Son once walked.
Strengthen our arms, soften our hearts,
and make our small acts signs of your great love.
Amen.