Miracles in the Target Parking Lot

Grace. It meets you exactly where you are, at your most pathetic and hopeless, and it loads you into its wheelbarrow and then tips you out somewhere else in ever so slightly better shape.
- Anne Lammott 

This story begins with poop in the pool, and ends with a miracle in the Target parking lot. 

Only God could write a story that good. 

For the past couple of years, my parents have generously gifted us a membership to their fancy gym for the summer. The gym is roughly 30 minutes from our house, and while I would never in a million years drive 30 minutes for a treadmill, I would drive 30 minutes for a pool. 

Today is the grand finale of our Yes Mom Summer. So I drive the 20+ miles to the fancy gym and haul our enormous swim bag carrying goggles and sunscreen and a bright pink puddle-jumper over my shoulder, shuffling all of us through the family locker room with limited grunting, determined to give my kids a fun day.

Outside, magically (mysteriously?) the pool is empty. Crystal clear. Every chair is open, even the nice ones in the shade with the canopies. I start to panic that maybe the pool isn’t open yet, because I’ve never seen it this empty. I approach the pool attendant at the counter and she assures me everything is fine, the pool is open. She asks how many towels we’d like. 

I take four clean towels from her and tell the kids, in my most excited voice, “You guys—we have the whole pool to ourselves!!!”

I cannot believe our luck. We’ll swim all morning, tire the kids out, order lunch here, then head home around 1:30 for Presley to nap. It’s the perfect last day of summer break.

After I spray everyone with sunscreen, we all wade into the pool. The water is the perfect temperature, 78 degrees if I had to guess. The boys take off for the deep end, doing trick jumps off the edge. Presley and I hover around the beach entrance, working on her kicks. 

I barely notice the two lifeguards stepping into the water near me, looking concerned. Out of the corner of my eye, I see them take a net to the pool, but Presley is pulling one of her “Watch me! Watch me, momma!” recitals, and my eyes stay locked on her. 

A lifeguard blows a whistle. 

“EVERYONE OUT OF THE POOL!”

Huh? 

Everyone = us. We are the only people in the pool. 

I yell back at the lifeguard, “Is this a swim break?” 

I know this pool does an official swim break about once an hour, where they make everyone get out. But we’re the only people in the pool, and we’ve only been swimming for ten minutes. 

She shakes her head, “EVERYONE OUT OF THE POOL FOR THIRTY MINUTES!” 

My boys make their way to the side of the pool, asking why they have to get out. I am trying to figure that out myself while pulling Presley out by her puddle-jumper. She’s gone limp, screaming, refusing to exit. 

We grab our towels and I look around the pool area searching for clues. What is happening right now? I see a number of lifeguards and pool attendants huddled together in little groups, speaking in hushed tones. 

You’d think they’d witnessed a sea monster. A shark. A used tampon. 

Finally I walk up to an attractive, tan lifeguard and ask her what happened. She hesitates, as if she’s not at liberty to say. 

“We … um ... found poop in the pool.”

I don’t know if I should cry or laugh or gag at this information, but, honestly, my first thought is: That’s … it? That’s what all the fuss is about? A little poop in the pool? 

Maybe it’s because I’m a mom. Maybe it’s because my toddler pooped in the bath just four nights ago. Maybe it’s because I don’t want this incident to ruin our day.

“Can I sign a waiver or something?” I ask her, visibly irritated at this inconvenience. “I mean … I don’t really care about poop in the pool? We just drove a long way to get here. It’s our last day of summer break.”

The lifeguard blinks at me, clearly appalled at what I’ve just said. She tells me no, everyone has to get out of the pool, it’s protocol. 

I sigh loudly, exasperated, still under the impression we can get back in the water in thirty minutes. My kids play with the cornhole set on the patio. I watch the clock, tapping my foot. But after thirty minutes, I notice one of the pool attendants taking down the umbrellas over the lifeguard chairs. When I ask about it, she tells me the pool is closed for the rest of the day. 

You’re kidding. 

She goes on to explain that when they attempted to pick up the poop in the net, it disintegrated, meaning it had been diarrhea, and the protocol for diarrhea is closing the pool for 24 hours to treat it with chemicals. 

I look at my kids baking in the sun, waiting patiently to get back in the pool, still in their swimsuits with goggles on their head. 

This is the moment where the day turned from glass-half-full to glass-half-empty. 

I never recovered.

Our walk to the parking lot is not cute—the kids are whining, unable to hide their disappointment, asking what is for lunch and can we go to Jamba Juice and when will we swim again and telling me, in exact words, this is the worst last day of summer ever. 

They’re not wrong.

I take deep breath after deep breath, sweating profusely in the parking lot, the sun beating down on us like the Sahara desert. Finally, with everyone buckled in the car, we begin the 30-minute trek back home, to the soundtrack of Presley telling us over and over again through shrieking sobs that she wants lemonade. 

As we make our way down the freeway, my mind starts ticking like a newsfeed, shifting from fun mode to productivity mode. I begin mentally cataloging all the things we need to do before school starts tomorrow. Laundry. Target run for food and diapers. Set up a homework station for the kids. Pack lunches. The clock in the car flashes 11:07am. I have plans to work on my manuscript from 5-8pm, so I’ll have a little over five hours to get everything else done. 

Once we’re home and settled, with everyone changed into dry clothes and Presley chugging her precious lemonade, I cannot bring myself to go back out for groceries. It’s 102 degrees. I am exhausted from the pool fiasco. After weighing options, I opt to do a Target drive-up order. It’s the perfect plan: I can order groceries, diapers, and a new lunchbox for Everett all in one swoop. (What happened to the one from last year, you ask? Nobody knows!) I’ll place the order during naptime. Brett can pick it up later with the kids while I’m writing. Done and done. 

Halfway through naptime, I spend close to 40 minutes carefully loading my cart. Everything I know we need—tortillas, eggs, applesauce pouches, coffee. I add pens and pencils from the school supply list, a lightning bolt lunchbox for Everett. I check and re-check, going down the mental list. Two hundred dollars later, I click view cart and checkout, but an error message appears at the top of my screen. 

Items saved for later. One or more items are now out of stock. 

Huh?

32 items have been moved to “saved for later.” 

7 items remain in my cart. 

Brett happens to wander into our room at this exact moment, which is when I promptly fall apart. 

“I just wasted 40 minutes in the Target app, and I STILL HAVE TO GO TO TARGET!” I wail. I start waving my hands in the air like a lunatic, complaining that everything is going wrong today.

“What are you so worked up about? Who are you mad at?” he asks. 

I tell him I am worked up about everything—we’re not ready for school, the teachers are already sending emails. Carson needs to bring five show-and-tell items in a tiny paper bag. Everett needs to collect magazine cutouts and pictures for his writing journal. What happened to Everett’s lunchbox? Where are the kids going to do homework? Both of their desks are in the garage, still sticky from last weekend’s lemonade stand. 

I mention the difficult work email I received yesterday, the one that’s been sitting in my chest like a brick. And the manuscript deadline looming over my head. And I can’t stop worrying about who Carson will eat lunch with on his first day in the cafeteria. 

It’s not about the stupid Target app, I tell him. It’s just … it’s 102 degrees and the kids are starting school tomorrow and I don’t feel ready and this was supposed to be our very best last day of summer and SOMEONE POOPED IN THE POOL. 

Brett, of course, does what he does best in these moments. He takes a deep breath with me. And then asks what we can do, in this moment, to make it better. I rattle off a list. We each commit to a handful of tasks. I agree to forego my writing night and head to Target once the heat cools off.

Brett suggests we get takeout for dinner. Might as well. We have no groceries, no meal plan. We pull up our go-to takeout website, create an order, head to checkout, and see this message: 

In order to better serve our in-house guests, online ordering is down at this time.

Huh?

We refresh the page. Refresh again. The error remains.

“It’s fine,” Brett tells me, “I’ll just call and place the order.” 

Brett calls. Gets put on hold and eventually hung up on. Calls again. Same thing happens. 

“Of course we can’t order takeout tonight,” I say with an eye roll, “Didn’t you get the memo? We’re having a no good, very bad day.”

***

Later, at Target, I walk through the automatic doors and suddenly understand how all my items disappeared. The store is a madhouse, packed with fellow procrastinators scouring the bottom of back to school bins. Amid the chaos, I can’t help but notice one lone backpack hanging on a hook like a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. I race to the lunchbox aisle, and my heart sinks. There is hardly anything left. Toy Story. Unicorns. Nothing Everett would like. I see the price tag label on a shelf where the lightning bolt lunchbox I had added to my drive-up order should have been. Gone. 

And even though he is nine, and even though I know sending him to the first day of school with a paper sack lunch is not the end of the world, I cannot deny the very acute feeling that I have failed today. After all we’ve been through in the past year and a half—school through pixels, no recess with friends, canceled field trips and class parties, the perils of distance learning—I just wanted my kids to have a good first day of school.

I just wanted to have a good last day of summer.

I make my way through the checkout and notice the time. 8:06pm. I should be home wrapping up my writing for the night. Instead, I am at Target without a lunchbox for my son.

As I walk toward my car, feeling deflated and sad, something in the sky catches my eye. In a cluster of billowy clouds, there is one standing out against the rest. One lone cloud—bright, electric orange, practically on fire.  

Without even thinking, I abandon my cart, grab my phone, and take a picture. I feel a sense of déjà vu, remembering another bad day, another miracle in the Target parking lot. Another time God painted the sky, beckoning my attention. Hey daughter, look up! I see you. I’m with you. 

And for what feels like the 15th time today, I break. Only this time it’s the good kind of break, the kind that shatters you and puts you back together slightly better than you were before. The kind where you are fully, completely, undeniably in the presence of God.

A friend and I were recently talking about how God moves and works, both in the physical realm and through His people. My friend, a brilliant scientist, admits she often struggles to see God moving in the physical things of this world. That her mind often defaults to logic. I always joke with her that we balance each other out, because I am terrible with math, and even worse with science. My brain leans toward words, and art, and beauty. Maybe that’s why it’s easy for me to see God in those things, to experience Him in ladybugs and clouds. 

By the time I finish putting the last bag into my car, the cloud is no longer orange. Poof, gone. You can call me crazy, but the timing of that one, fleeting, radiant cloud? Directly above my car? In the exact minute I happened to be in the parking lot?

It felt like God put it there just for me. 

***

I didn’t get to work on my manuscript tonight. Sometimes when my writing plans fall apart (as they often do), I can become bitter. Resentful. Stressed.

But tonight, I feel none of those things.

Tonight, I am simply reminded of the way God is forcing me to live out the message of this book as I write it. 

He’s not letting me take shortcuts. He’s not letting me phone this manuscript in. If I write about paying attention, you better believe He’s going to call me to pay attention. If I write about capturing beauty, He’s going to give me something beautiful to capture. 

And it’s there, standing in the Target parking lot after a crappy day, that I realize: this is what it means to be an artist. This is what it means to create in the margins, this right here, taking a step away from my shopping cart to document a miracle in the sky. This exact moment is what my whole book is about—looking for hope when we feel hopeless, looking for light when the day seems dark, capturing beauty and grace and sharing it with the world through our words, our paintings, our music, our photographs. 

I was ready to write this whole day off as a waste. A lost cause. A horrible, no good, very bad day. 

But God wouldn’t let me do that. 

He had a better plan. A better story.

Madeline L’Engle writes in Walking on Water, “All of us who have given birth to a baby, to a story, know that it is ultimately mystery, closely knit to God’s own creative activities, which did not stop at the beginning of the universe. God is constantly creating, in us, through us, with us, and to co-create with God is our human calling.”

Tonight, God didn’t want me to work on my book. 

He wanted me to live it. 

And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that in itself is worth the horrible, no good, very bad day.