All English Muffins are not alike on the YBR, nor should they be.

With social media taking over our lives I fear that we’ve moved from having superficial relationships to having what I call “surface-ficial” relationships. Many of us are no deeper than our facebook profile photo. Of course that’s not true, but it is so much safer and easier to be surface people. But as we trod the YBR we gain so much along the way.  Every knock and every boost goes into making us who we are. But rather than reveal the inner us, we show the world our outside.

Just think about the many people who have been or still are in your life. Just think about the hundreds upon hundreds of people you have met and will meet on the YBR. Because we travel the YBR at breakneck speed we don’t have the time to see more than what we see on the outside of  person.  Of course there are people whose insides show on the outside.  Sadness seems to rise to the surface and hardships also can shape the surface.  Happiness and joy can also radiate on the surface as well. But for the most part we hide much of what is inside us.

In the classic musical “A Chorus Line,” the opening lines in the opening song say, “Who am I anyway. Am I my resume.”  Well, modern man can often be reduced to a resume, but that only scratches the surface.

Take the ordinary English Muffin. On the surface it looks like most other English Muffins. It’s not until you fork-split one, that you reveal what the makers of Thomas’ English Muffins call the nooks and crannies.

If you fork split open a person you reveal not just nooks and crannies, but every knock and every boost of a person’s life.  In short, once fork-split, we reveal our character. And it’s only after you do this can you actually understand who someone is and how someone became the person they are.

So many people who mean something to us step off the YBR without us ever having ever seen all those “nooks and crannies.”  And once gone, it’s too late.

I had an Aunt Mary who was an extraordinary English Muffin.  Fortunately as I got older (and I dare say, wiser) I got to see inside my Aunt Mary.  She had far many more knocks than she did have boosts, from being abused by a wicked step-mother, to having a very challenging marriage to my uncle that eventually led to a permanent separation.

But through it all and sharing all her love to raise two amazing sons, she glowed and had a laugh that was contagious.

Unless we see the “nooks and crannies” that make up a person, we can never say we know them.  Unless we are willing to let people see our “nooks and crannies,” we will never be authentic.

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Deserving on the YBR. It’s complicated.

Today we toss words around like a volleyball and as a result the words not only lose meaning but get turned inside out.  The word “deserve” comes to mind because a young neighbor of ours just lost his mother suddenly and his father, who is divorced from the mother, is battling cancer.  My wife said that no family deserves that much hardship.  And while I agreed with her that such a burden was more than anyone can handle, I disagreed with the word “deserve.”

A very old word that once simply meant the benefits accord to someone who was worthy of them because of what they had done.  Being deserving was not a trivial honor. It was a high form of “earned”recognition.

Today you might hear someone say that a young Boy Scout who was working in a soup kitchen did not deserve to have his bike stolen or the young rock star did not deserve such praise and adulation.  In both cases the sense of deserving is purely subjective.  We, in our often misguided ways, think we have a right to determine who should or should not be deserving.

Did the Wicked Witch of the East deserve to die when the housing market dropped?  She was evil and if we are to believe the Munchkins, she ruled Munchkin Land as a cruel despot. So, did she get what she deserved? And did the Wicked Witch of the West get what she deserved by being melted away?

I believe in the demise of the Wicked Witches we are talking about our sense of justice which is “the administering of deserved punishment or reward.”

In our daily and ordinary lives we often confuse deserving or not deserving of something with our sense of “fairness.”  We don’t think it’s fair when someone we believe is good , and therefore deserving of good tidings, is stricken with cancer or suffers some tragedy.  We also don’t think it’s fair when a rich and powerful person gets richer or more powerful…for no reason.

We need to forget about deserving and fairness in the human condition unless we can say justice has been abused.  And when justice is abused we not only have the right, we have the obligation to fight to see that justice triumphs.

I think the worst thing we can do is bring in a “supernatural being” into the equation as if this “being” is the cause of or responsible for usually allowing bad things to happen. When we do this we minimize we make ourselves a pitiful victim of a whimsical god.

Bottom line?  We should be advocates for justice (and mercy). And we should stop thinking we deserve anything just because.  I don’t “deserve” to be treated fairly.  I can’t be responsible for other people’s actions. I can only be responsible for the way I think and the way I act.  I need to live each day being a positive force.  I need to be kind and caring. I need to put others before me. But that does not mean I should not stand strong against injustice.   That’s where I stand firm and say no one “deserves” to be the victim of injustice.

Complicated…right?

 

 

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