I went to Wal-Mart yesterday on a jellybean hunt. Do you know how hard it is to find ordinary jellybeans, basic fruit flavors with a few black ones mixed in? I hunted through the Easter candy. I found gourmet jellybeans, Lifesaver jellybeans, Starburst jellybeans, Jolly Rancher jellybeans, various assortments of Jelly Bellies, but no ordinary bags. And no blacks.
I know I sound fussy, but I needed certain colors for an object lesson at church this morning. I needed black for sin, red for the blood of Jesus Christ who died for us, white for a clean heart when we believe in Christ, and yellow for our home in heaven. Is it too much to ask for black, red, white and yellow jellybeans?
I hunted through the Easter candy. I hunted through the grocery section. I went back to the Easter candy aisles. Finally, I found one-dollar bags of Brach's spice jellybeans on the bottom shelf. Yes, they had black! I grabbed two bags. But, woe! These bags didn't have yellow. Hm...Lifesaver jellybeans have yellow. I grabbed a bag of them.
In the same trip, my mom and I also purchased groceries, medication, socks and stickers. All in half-an-hour. The experience reminded me of a paragraph by Michael Dobbs in Down with Big Brother:
A turning point in Yeltsin’s intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him. For Yeltsin, like many other first-time Russian visitors to America, this was infinitely more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours. And it was all so attractively displayed. For someone brought up in the drab conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, a visit to a Western supermarket involved a full-scale assault on the senses.
We tend to forget how amazing our blessings are. Okay, I didn't find an ordinary bag of jellybeans; but I had a grand selection from which to choose. I was able to buy three bags for a total of four dollars. I had the exact colors I wanted. I could take them to church the next morning, the church of my choosing. I could use them to teach the children about God, and I had no fear of government intrusion.
So the next time you eat jellybeans, remember all these blessings. Be thankful. And if you don't like the black ones, save them for me.
“You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by the way he eats jelly beans" ~ Ronald Reagan
