A Formative Encounter While Shopping for the Month

I’m usually not my best self at Costco. I’m pretty certain it has something to do with how crowded it usually is there. No matter how good the deals are, navigating the tightly packed aisles to get what I came for almost always involves constant, high-level awareness of how massive everyone’s carts are, how much space my own cart is taking up, and no time or room to shop in peace. 

On a recent Saturday morning Costco run, however, something odd happened to me. As I began charting my course through the warehouse, it suddenly dawned on me that I was intentionally avoiding eye contact with my fellow shoppers. I can’t tell you how many years ago I started doing this. But in that moment, I suddenly knew exactly why I was doing it: I was pretending they didn’t exist.  

A second realization quickly followed the first: that the hands that pushed these other carts belonged to precious creations, each fully human, worthy to be seen. My fellow shoppers were deeply loved by God; each worthy to be acknowledged.

So I began to intentionally choose to look at the people around me. I smiled at them, acknowledging their presence and humanity. It was glorious. I’ve never felt so good leaving Costco!

The work of spiritual formation must first begin with my own unforming, a time of clearing space for God to work, a time of letting go of the God we thought we knew, in order to know the God who truly is. Share on X

As unexpected as this experience was for me, spiritual director and professor Cindy S. Lee argues that it is precisely in mundane, routine events like shopping runs to Costco that our souls are shaped most profoundly by God. Lee reflects on how regularly God meets us in the mundanity of our lives in her profound book, Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation:  

“Spirituality happens in our daily experiences with God…In the end, the spiritual life is not just formed in the crisis moments when we may need God most. Instead our spirituality is also experienced through the mundane, ordinary days. Our most routine, uneventful days are when our spirituality, our divine-human interaction, is happening, although we are often unaware. Spirituality is the way we connect our everyday lives to the divine.”¹Cindy S. Lee, Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2022), 138.

Although Lee’s words resonate deeply with me, the truth is, up until that Saturday at Costco, my personal experience has mostly been the polar opposite. About nine years ago, I decided to step away from full-time ministry as a pastor. Although many warned me that the change would be difficult spiritually, I still underestimated how hard it would be. It wasn’t so much the fact that for the first time in 12 years I wasn’t preaching regularly anymore, or even that we left behind a loving and warm congregation that felt like family. I think it was the fact that, as a full-time minister, I rarely had the “mundane, ordinary days” that Lee speaks of. In full-time ministry, my days and weeks more often than not were full of crisis moments: some large, some a bit smaller, but always real and critical in the eyes of those experiencing them. Late night hospital trips, phone calls from distraught engaged couples, joyous weddings and tearful funerals — my weeks were anything but mundane or ordinary. As I look back, I often was the first person people looked to to provide leadership and guidance. It was challenging, yet deeply rewarding work.

Then, one Sunday morning, it was just me and my family. Our lives still felt full, even hectic – but in a different way. Less hair was on fire, fewer Saturday nights were spent wrestling through a challenging passage from Scripture like Jacob becoming Israel (See Genesis 32:22-32). Instead, there was more holding little hands at bedtime, shuttling my kids back and forth from Taekwondo, and guessing blindly at the slow work of building adult friendships. For the first time since entering seminary, no one really looked to me to see what I thought about a particular theological question or what my vision for the future was. I was merely another person at the store, another co-worker, and another school parent that everyone could look past. 

My calendar was now full of mundane, ordinary days, but instead of being fertile soil for the Divine-human interaction to take root in and grow, each passing day reinforced my own sense of invisibility. And as I felt less and less seen, my connection to my identity as a beloved child of God faded as well, to the point where I began to think nothing of completely ignoring fellow souls running their Saturday morning errands around me. 

Except not this Saturday.

Although I didn’t know it when I stepped down from full-time ministry almost a decade ago, it is clear now that I needed time to go through my own deconstructive unforming. (1/3) Share on X

Years of being seen primarily by most of the people I knew and loved as 'Pastor Ben' had been incredibly fulfilling, but the visibility that came with that title had shaped how I connected with God without me realizing it. (2/3) Share on X

I needed to come to know God once again without identifying as the first person congregants looked to for help in their moment of need or for answers in their season of doubt. One glorious Saturday at Costco, that happened. (3/3) Share on X

For some reason, on this Saturday the wall between Divine and human began to thin in the most mundane of places: Costco. For some reason, this Saturday I felt a nudge: that the Holy Spirit wasn’t stuck in the pages I was reading less and less often, but was active, here and now. I saw the humans around me as the precious creations of God that they truly were. 

Why this Saturday? Why this Costco run? 

Much ink has been spilled on the topic of deconstruction, and for some, the jury is still out as to how to actually define it. Some describe deconstruction as a “shallow critique” that rejects Christianity without fully considering the whole tradition of the faith.²Tish Harrison Warren, “The Church Needs Reformation, Not Deconstruction”, Christianity Today, October 19, 2021. Joshua Harris referred to his own falling away from Christianity as deconstruction in a viral Instagram post. Theologian Kirsten Sanders defines deconstruction with a bit more nuance, referring to it as “the struggle to correct or deepen naïve belief.”³Kirsten Sanders, “Wait, You’re Not Deconstructing?,” Christianity Today, February 14, 2022.  

Cindy Lee, however, argues that there is a necessary type of deconstruction that must take place in everyone’s life, a process which she calls “our unforming.” This unforming, Lee writes, is needed to clear out the “clutter and cobwebs that build up in us over time and prevent us from experiencing the sacred.”⁴Lee, 7. The necessity of our unforming journeys is even more critically necessary for BIPOC believers like myself, as we must reckon with “how the Western church has forced us to conform to white Western values, ideologies, and systems.”⁵Lee, 139. The work of spiritual formation must first begin with my own unforming, a time of clearing space for God to work, a time of letting go of the God we thought we knew, in order to know the God who truly is.

Although I didn’t know it when I stepped down from full-time ministry almost a decade ago, it is clear now that I needed time to go through my own deconstructive unforming. Years of being seen primarily by most of the people I knew and loved as “Pastor Ben” had been incredibly fulfilling, but the visibility that came with that title had shaped how I connected with God without me realizing it. I needed to come to know God once again without identifying as the first person congregants looked to for help in their moment of need or for answers in their season of doubt and confusion. For one glorious Saturday, that’s exactly what happened: I encountered God as just another deeply loved shopper at Costco. 

People ask me sometimes if I’ll ever get back into full-time ministry, and the truth is, I have no idea. What I am sure of is that I’m thankful for this time of unforming, as painful as it has been. I was always more than the title of “Pastor Ben,” and after nine years of no longer carrying it, I am beginning to see glimpses of myself and others as the precious, beloved children of God we truly are.

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This Saturday I felt a nudge: that the Holy Spirit wasn’t stuck in the pages I was reading less and less often, but was active, here and now. I saw the humans around me as the precious creations of God that they truly were. Share on X

*Editorial Note: Ben’s surprising encounter with God in the midst of a Costco run, and the subsequent ‘unforming’ it caused within his own heart, is the sixth article in a summer series that we will publish over the next few weeks, introducing our 2024 Writing Fellows Cohort in their own voices. ~CK