Always Ask for a Receipt

I often ask God to reveal himself to me in obvious ways.

Maybe I’m weak of faith, or maybe I’m just an experiential learner, but I don’t truly believe or understand something until I’ve rolled up my sleeves and gotten my hands dirty. Dug my fingers into the dirt and examined the issue from every angle. Seen the nails in Christ’s hands and touched his side.

And occasionally God does reveal himself to me in obvious ways. The following experience may seem like a coincidence, a stroke of luck, but I believe it was God speaking to me through the mundane. There was no burning bush. No cloud or pillar of fire. No angel in my dreams. 

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were reviewing our bank statement from the previous month and noticed an unusually high transaction from Kroger. On any given week, we spend about $100–150 on groceries. This transaction was over $350.

At first, I was worried my card information had been stolen, but I quickly realized we did shop at Kroger on the date in our statement. I rarely get receipts, but I distinctly remember not being offered one on that day. The cashier told us our total, but she didn’t ask if we wanted our receipt before moving on to the next customer’s groceries. We took our full cart and left, not thinking twice about the exchange.

By the time we realized there was something off with our transaction, nearly six weeks had passed, and I had little hope of resolving the situation. I didn’t have the receipt. After three calls to Kroger’s corporate finance department, I was able to obtain a copy of it.

It showed all our regular purchases—bananas, seltzer, ground beef—as well as some things I’ve never purchased. Twenty dollars worth of organic blueberries. Three Febreze plug-in replacements. A brand of deodorant that irritates my husband’s skin.

I called back Kroger corporate. They directed me to the store where the transaction took place, which wasn’t able to help me over the phone and instructed me to come into the store to speak with a customer service representative. My jaw began to ache. I’d been grinding my teeth for the entire hour I’d been on the phone.

From my rough calculations, it looked like more than $200 of the bill was from items I hadn’t purchased. If it had been a couple of bucks, I wouldn’t have noticed or bothered to call the store, but $200 is a lot of money for a young couple, and when I realized we’d paid for someone else’s full grocery haul, my stomach churned. My face burned. I had no proof the items on the receipt weren’t mine. To get a refund for those things, Kroger would have to take my word for it—that they weren’t part of my order. 

The printout of the receipt sat on my desk all week. My husband was working the night shift, and I didn’t have the gumption to march up to the customer service desk alone. So on Saturday morning, we headed over to the grocery store armed with our marked-up receipt and feigned confidence. He reassured me that Kroger was a multibillion-dollar corporation—they could afford to refund us a couple hundred dollars. No one would go to the trouble of sitting on hold with a call center to get a copy of a receipt, mark it up with a highlighter, and come in nearly six weeks later to ask for a refund. 

A kind-eyed woman with graying curls met us at the customer service desk. Before I even got into my spiel about what happened, she asked if we’d come in early last month and checked out at register eight or nine. I glanced over my shoulder, and I think we had checked out at one of those registers. 

“Hang on. I have your original receipt in the back.” She bustled to the backroom in her blue apron and returned a few seconds later with a leafy receipt. “March 9?” Her eyes flicked up to meet mine over the frames of her glasses. My husband and I exchanged glances. 

“I remember you two.” She pushed her glasses up her nose and compared the receipt to our print-out. “I was hoping y’all would come back.” 

She explained that the system never finished processing our card before the cashier started on the next order. The worker realized what had happened not long after we left, but she had no way to contact us to rectify the situation. 

In less than five minutes, she had nearly $220 refunded to my card. I didn’t have to explain any more of the situation or beg her to give us our money back. In fact, she knew more about the situation than I did and had been waiting for us to come back so she could help us resolve it. As she typed on the computer, my husband shot me a look that said, “I told you there was nothing to worry about.” And there hadn’t been. The situation turned out better than I ever could have hoped.

Some people may interpret this experience as a remarkable concurrence of events, but it’s more than remarkable. It’s miraculous. 

As a chronic worrier, I always catastrophize about the worst-case scenario and try to mentally prepare myself for the absolute worst possible outcome I can imagine. (I have another blog post on this very topic.) Even if I had dreamt of the best possible outcome for this ordeal, it wouldn’t have been nearly as beautiful as the reality. 

When I pray, I often ask for things at face value. Lord, please help us get our money back. Yet God augments those requests with his extraordinary grace, layering on additional blessings that not only fulfill the request, but also satisfy deficiencies I didn’t know I had. Yes, he restored those funds to our account, but he also strengthened my trust. Gave me a moment of awe. And even closed the loop for that Kroger employee.

“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”  James 1:17 (CSB)