Empty Shelves

Yesterday I spent several hours in the city doing the month's grocery shopping. It's always an adventure, especially when I shop at the store that doesn't bag the groceries for you. I usually end up at the end of the counter, stuffing several hundred dollars worth of food into bags while customers glare at me for taking up all the room.

It amazed me as I walked up and down the aisles to see shelf after shelf, empty. There was no rice, flour, very little pasta, and even the dried beans were picked through. As I walked through the store, I again felt gratitude for the prophet's direction to store food. None of those items were on my list - although I will confessing to buying rice last week when I heard news reports about shortages.

There have been many times in my adult life when my family and I have lived off the food that we've stored. I've always been a firm believer in the concept of food storage and I always plan my grocery list so it includes items we won't use during the month. Whenever I've utilized it before, it's been because of single motherhood or unemployment, never because the shelves in the grocery store were empty.

So yesterday's shopping trip was quite a wake-up call for me. And all the complaining I've been doing in my head about having to plant a garden has stopped. Now I look at it as more security in my basement in the fall.