Two New Jersey men sued Subway this week, claiming the fast-food chain’s foot-long sandwiches are not a foot long (read the news article). The suit comes on the heels of a picture that was posted on the restaurant’s Facebook page, showing one of their sandwiches next to a 12-inch ruler. The sandwich came up short by a few millimeters. According to the mens’ lawyer, Stephen DeNittis, Subway owes customers about 45 cents per sandwich. Says DeNittis, “It’s not about the money. Class actions are to correct mass wrongs that involve small damages.”  

Speaking of mass wrongs, has anyone taken a look lately at the world just beyond the end of their Subway bun? I find it hard to get worked up about losing a few millimeters off a sandwich that is bigger than I should be eating anyway, when I am painfully aware of a world that is poor, oppressed, broken and desperately in need of hope. People like the 140,000 in Congo whose homes were recently pillaged and whose wives and children were raped by marauding rebels. People like the thousands of 12-year-old girls in Asia whose bodies are being trafficked to fulfill the lusts of Western tourists.

I guess somebody has to take care of the “mass wrongs” perpetrated by culinary criminals here in America, but somehow it seems terribly myopic to me. Myopia is a vision condition in which close items are seen clearly, but objects farther away appear blurred. Applied to the way we see the world, spiritual myopia is a condition in which our own injustices appear razor sharp, but those of others are terribly blurred.

God give us 20/20 vision when it comes to discerning what really matters! Or as that other fast-food chain says, help us “think outside the bun!”