WLSU: 14 Kinds of Ketchup

It was July.

I had just come home from a year of service as a missionary of The Episcopal Church in the Northern Philippines. With independence fully in my grasp, I drove a car, for the first time in a long time, and took the list my mom had handed to me up to the local grocery store.

I scanned the list intently, tried to calculate the best route to the dairy section (which is always way in the back left corner away from everything else) and strolled into isle seventeen as I came to one simple word.

Ketchup.

How hard can that be? Get some ketchup from the grocery store.

Problem was, there in front of me, staring at me like a Martian in a nightmare of inundation, were exactly fourteen different types of ketchup: classic, sugar free, spicy jalapeno, carrot ketchup, no-mato, restaurant style, chili-pepper ketchup, ketchup with a blend of veggies, curry ketchup, Tapatio, habanero, rainbow ketchup for kids, some fancy pants organic stuff in a glass jar, and the ever present Heinz 57.

I stood there looking at each one. The list just said “ketchup.” So, which one do I choose?

I started reading nutrition labels and checking prices. I felt my heart rate increase steadily as I broke into a cold sweat.

Which ketchup do I get? What did she want it for? Is it for a recipe? Are we grilling out? This should not be hard.

“Just buy them all!” I started to say to myself.

My breathing became labored, and a nice old man passed by, gently offering a, “Do you need help with something?”

I shook my head no, but I was lying. I very much did need help, but I didn’t yet know why.

I called my dad.

“Dad, the list says, ‘ketchup.’ What kind?”

“What do you mean, what kind? Just get some ketchup.”

He could hear the panic in my voice, as I rattled off some jumbled mess about the overloaded enterprise of capitalism and how surely, there had never before been this many types of ketchup in one grocery store ever before.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I knew I wasn’t.

“I think I’m having a heart attack in the ketchup isle,” I blurted out.

“You’re not having a heart attack,” he rebutted, “You’re just overwhelmed.”

“Take some deep breaths. Go to the produce isle. I don’t know, hold some mangoes.”

I left the billions of tiny bottles filled with red goo and headed for greener pastures.

In a fit of anxiety, I fell to the floor, my body shaking, as I openly wept, in public, covered in produce.

It was not one of my finer moments.

A lady from the store sat with me, as I worked out my own internal existential life crisis of excess; of the abundance that had always been there for me, and how I was completely blind to it, until that day, when I couldn’t unsee it anymore.

You see, in Besao, the little mountain village in the Philippines that had changed my life, we didn’t have ketchup. Hell, we didn’t even have indoor plumbing.

Everyone told me that the culture-shock of moving to somewhere like that would be hard, and I would miss the worldly comforts I was used to, and I would struggle to fit in; but they never told me how hard it would be to come home.

Even if they had, I probably wouldn’t have believed them.

What could be hard about coming home?

I spent the next year or so pretty much just mad about everything, but mostly about the presence of American indulgence. I lived as simply as I could, ate a very basic diet, and struggled to find empathy for friends and family, and even for myself, when presented with, y know, “first world problems.”

Over the years I’ve realized though, that conversion, deep, life-changing transformations, can take time to work themselves out within us. Change is not always something that smacks us over the head, or knocks us off our horse, or blinds us as we walk the path of normalcy.

Sometimes, being transformed by Love is something that happens without us even knowing it.

When I first moved away from everything I had ever known, my mom sent me a letter, and in it she wrote, “Melanie, when you don’t have what you want, want what you have.”

Embracing that truth, that love, that wisdom; that transformed me.

It transformed me while I was living in Besao, and it has continued to transform me over the past fifteen years.

Embracing a simpler way of life allowed me the opportunity to both give thanks for the opportunities my privilege affords me, and make a way forward that is deeply conscious of the reality that not everybody lives like this. Living there opened my eyes to what was missing here amidst our myriad of choices.

My grocery store melt-down reminded me that it’s not the stuff around you that matters; it’s the people. It’s the friend you call when you’re not okay. It’s the stranger you encounter in the grocery store, whose struggle you can’t even begin to comprehend. It’s the presence of God in the slow, yet persistent conversion of life, as you become who God always knew you were meant to be.

Eventually, I pulled myself up off the floor of the grocery store and made my way home to the warm embrace of people who loved me for who I was. Even when I didn’t bring home a single bottle of ketchup.