Dear friends, don’t believe every spirit. Test the spirits to see if they are from God because many false prophets have gone into the world. This is how you know if a spirit comes from God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come as a human is from God, and every spirit that doesn’t confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and is now already in the world. – 1 John 4:1-3 (CEB)
I came across a discarded shopping list in the parking lot of the grocery store not too long ago as I was on my way into the store. I found myself reading through it, trying to decipher the abbreviations being used that were never meant to be understandable to anyone but the writer of the list. Looking over the list, it was amazing to me how different the list was from any I would ever put together. I knew what most of the items were, but not all of them. Many items I knew where things I would be unlikely to ever buy. The ones I did not know I made a point of looking for in the store (it was not a huge supermarket), and I found a whole world of products that I was completely unaware existed on shelves I had never noticed. It was a list for things from the same store that I always used but the choices made within the store were utterly foreign or different to me.
I will admit that I have a pretty standard set of things that I buy when I get groceries. I know the meals I most often cook, what others in my family tend to expect to be available in the kitchen, and who in the family is likely to eat which foods. Many of my food purchases, then, are based on things that I know I can count on. Other choices are based in my values: trying to make healthy food choices, minimize packaging and other ecological impacts, focusing on buying produce directly from farmers when possible, and so forth. Combining history, comfort, reliability, and values puts together a unique profile of my shopping list. The list that I came across in the parking lot was from someone with different concerns for each of those variables. It created for them a completely different experience of walking through those same dozen aisles in the store, and in consequence a different experience of life each day. We moved in the same spaces but encountered them quite differently. My getting a peak at that list, though, gave me a reason to look at parts of the reality that I walked by regularly without noticing and get a glimpse at a different way of viewing reality. Some of the things on the list are foods that I may very well try and some point and might find that I enjoy deeply. Who knows? The peak at difference can reveal new things that I will enjoy, while possibly also things that don’t fit my taste, budget, values, or needs.
I am finding this image of the grocery list a metaphor for life as a Christian. For most of us, we came into the church through our families. It’s what we know. We have found the church to reliably nourish us in familiar ways. We know that we can count on it. Our values are also shaped by being disciples of Jesus, and that shapes the choices we make each day. Yet there are others – Christians, people of other religions, people who are non-religious – who live right beside us, shopping in the same store if you will. They make choices that might be completely different from ours. Sometimes they are choices that we could never imagine or choices that we might find to be too risky. Getting a glimpse of those choices can be useful for us. Some of those choices might be things that could be spiritually nourishing for us to help us in our growth in our spiritual life. These are new things that might be worth trying. Others are things that we find go against our values and so we would not try. Others simply do not fit our tastes or needs. A benefit of being exposed to different ways of being is to see that there are options available to us that we would never have come across otherwise. The challenge is being able to differentiate which differences are problematic, which are indifferent, and which might enhance our experience of God. It is a continual work of openness and discernment to be able to encounter new ideas and ways of being and determine which ones might help us grow in faithfulness to Christ and which would be spiritually harmful. Still, we can start by looking with an open mind at the other shopping lists out there and realize that our list is not the only possible one.