From the Grocery Aisle to the Super Bowl

In 1994, Kurt Warner went undrafted out of the University of Northern Iowa. No NFL team wanted him. To support his family, he took a job stocking shelves at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa, earning five dollars and fifty cents an hour. He bagged groceries on the night shift while clinging to a dream that seemed to be dying.

Warner kept working. He played arena football with the Iowa Barnstormers. He waited. And in 1999, when St. Louis Rams starter Trent Green tore his ACL in the preseason, Warner got his chance. That season, the former grocery clerk threw forty-one touchdown passes, led the Rams to a Super Bowl XXXIV victory, and was named NFL Most Valuable Player.

Nobody looking at Kurt Warner under those fluorescent grocery store lights would have predicted what the Almighty was preparing. But God has never been limited by our current circumstances.

The apostle Paul wrote that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation — the old has gone, the new has come. Transformation rarely looks the way we expect. It doesn't skip the grocery store aisles or the arena league seasons. It moves through them. Every shelf Warner stocked was shaping discipline. Every small-stage snap was building readiness for a stage he couldn't yet see.

Whatever aisle God has you stocking right now, trust that He is not finished with your story.