With the dawn of grocery delivery and online ordering for pickup, grocery shopping is becoming less common but I don’t foresee it going away as a regular part of every day life anytime soon. Quick trips for milk, bread and forgotten ingredients will always remain. Being that this is a part of our ordinary lives, we can also seize these moments to talk about God and shape faith as we are charged to do in Deuteronomy 6:6-7:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the way, when you lie down and when you get up.”

Here are some ideas for how we can talk about faith and point our families to God while grocery shopping:

• Comparisons-As you compare products by brand, ingredient, price or what simply looks best, talk about all the criteria that we look at to “pick” things. Then talk about how over and over throughout Scripture God doesn’t use the criteria that people use to choose His children, to appoint rulers, or to call people to a special task—God looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16).
• Who made that?-Depending on the age of your children, play a simple game of “who made that?” in the grocery store aisles. Talk about how God made foods to nourish our bodies and He even gave ideas for ingredients and recipes to people too!
• Needs & Wants-You may need cereal for breakfast at your house, but do you need Cookie Crisp or Lucky Charms? Those might be more wants. Use the aisles and the requests of your children (and yourself!) to discern between needs and wants. Talk about how God knows both our needs and our wants. He provides us with “everything we need to support this body and life” (Luther’s Small Catechism) and sometimes gives us bonus blessings of our wants too. How great is our God to provide us with all of our needs? How great is our God to also give us many of our wants? Talk about how we work hard to be able to buy things but ultimately God is the provider of all that too.
• Shopping Carts-As you use your shopping cart to carry all of your finds through the store, talk about what we as Christians are carriers of. What does it mean to be a carrier of each of these things. Why has God decided to utilize His children in these ways? How are we enabled to carry the things God has given us to carry? Is carrying the things of God a burden or a blessing? Why?

 Next time you stop by the grocery store, don’t forget you can use the time to chat about meaningful things of God and how they intersect with our shopping and our daily lives.