Day 26: The Wal-Mart manager

It had been an incredibly frustrating day. I’m missed multiple opportunities and went home for the day without having done my job. So I went back out after the kids were in bed and found myself, with nowhere else to go, at Wal-Mart. The place of last resort.

This time I walked into the store and asked for the manager. I believe it was the assistant manager I’d found, and she asked if she could help me with something. “Well,” I said, “I just came here to pray for the manager of the store.” She laughed, “Pray for him?” I think she thought it was a joke, and I told her that it was just something I liked to do for people. She was very cooperative then, and told me the manager that night was Jason. He could be found in the electronics department.

Two guys were standing behind the counter when I got there. I asked if Jason was there. “You just missed him,” they said. Great, I thought. She’d radioed back to tell him some crazy guy was on his way to pray for him. I could almost picture a store manager hiding in the shoe department somewhere. But one of the guys behind the counter spotted him over the tops of the aisles and yelled for him to come over.

I met him half way. “They told me someone was coming back here,” he said, looking a little confused. I told him I wanted to pray for him. More confusion. I told him it was just something I liked to do for people. He reluctantly said that would be OK but asked if that meant I would just go home and pray for him or if I wanted to do it right there in the store. This was a guy who wanted all the details up front.

So I told him I wanted to pray for him now. This made him uneasy. He kind of glanced around and said he really wasn’t comfortable with me doing that in the store. So I started walking down an aisle, and he followed, continuing to worry. So I stopped. “Here,” I said, “I’m going to look at a product.” I can’t remember what we were standing in front of, but I just bowed my head and prayed. He bowed his head as well.

I prayed for Jason’s work and his family and the business. Yes, I prayed for the success of that Wal-Mart store. When I was done, he looked at me, relieved. “So that’s it,” he said. Yep. We talked a little while longer – small talk stuff, about how long he’d worked there and about the store, which is still pretty new. Then we shook hands and I left.