Is God Using Walmart?

Don't you just love Morgan Freeman? I think he is one of the ten best actors working today. He has that wonderful voice, and his eyes always seem to be smiling, as if he knows something very, very funny and is about to share it with you. He was able to carry that wretched actor Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption, making that movie my second favorite adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Normally, Mr. King's novels and the movie that comes later have only a title in common. The Shining is an excellent example of this, but Mr. Freeman made that prison movie wonderful in spite of Tim Robbins. To get back to point, in another movie of his, Mr. Freeman plays God to Steve Carrell's Evan. It's a sequel, another thing that usually makes me nervous. Nothing is worse than a group of people guilty of going to the well too often, but Evan Almighty is a cute movie with something that you don't see too often in Hollywood. It features a religious person who isn't a bigot, hypocrite, or a crazy person. Just someone with a deep and abiding faith. Cool. So anyway, to shorten this, at one point God is explaining how he works to someone. He tells them, "If you pray for strength, I don't give you strength, I give you opportunities to be strong." Or something like that. Either way, that phrase really stayed with me because I have on many many MANY occasions prayed for patience. I think now I was being given opportunities to be patient. Maybe that's what Walmart is, do you think? If you pray for patience, God certainly lets you have opportunities at the retail fun house we all know and love, doesn't he? If you are praying for hope, strength or courage, He fires a lot of those opportunities at you everyday while you are there also,doesn't he? Wouldn't it be fantastic if Walmart was in fact just a way for God to test us and give us opportunities for the things that he wants us to have? I think it would be, anyway. Some times that thought is the only one getting me through a particularly crazy patch in my life. So, if Walmart is giving you fits-and the odds of that look pretty good- don't despair, perhaps God is just giving you opportunities. I hope that that helps. If it does, you can thank me later.