Blog 3825 – 05.13.2026
Do You Know What Your Business You Are In?
A couple of lines come to me as I consider what to write about this morning? First, a line uttered by the apple picking and cider making foreman in one of my favorite movies, Cider House Rules. The foreman catches Jack, a disgruntled team member, throwing a cigarette into a batch of apple cider that he is stirring in a huge vat and tells him that he is going to have to fish out that cigarette before it ruins the whole batch. In a test of wills, Jack pulls out his knife. The foreman asked him a question, “Do you know what business you are in?” Another team mate tells Jack to tell the foreman that he is in the apple business not the knife fighting business, in a flash the foreman pulls his own knife and cuts Jack slicker half off in a move Jack never saw coming. Jack realizes that he does not want to be in the knife fighting business with his foreman, takes off the shredded slicker and goes into the vat to remove the cigarette.
The second line comes from one of my favorite plays, based on A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead long-time partner in business who has come to warn him to avoid his fate of having to forever wear the heavy chains and ledger books that he had forged in life. To Ebenezer casual remark that Jacob had been good in business, the tortured soul yells out: “Business, mankind was my business!”
Therein lies the answer to the eternal question,”Why am I here, and what is my business? In a brief glimpse of a twelve-year old Jesus, one of the Gospel writers records that on an annual family pilgrimage from Nazareth to the Temple in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover that on the way home Mary and Joseph discovered Jesus was not with their party so they returned to look for him. After several days searching high and low they found him sitting in the Temple asking astute questions of the wise old men who gathered there. When his parents scolded the boy Jesus and said they had been looking everywhere for him, he calmly said, “Didn’t you know that I would be about my Father’s business.”
Children who are raised in the Mafia, politics, and high finance seem to think and act like the “family business” is making a profit any way they can and especially preying on the weaknesses, fears, and gullibilities of others. Yet, the true “Family Business” is not picking apples, knife fighting, selling crypto coins, nor any of any such thing it is loving our brothers and sisters, Our Family.
Some might say that I need to mind my own business, that any regulations or restraints on Capitalism is bad for business. To that I say with Jacob Marley that mankind is my business. The family business is taking care of the whole family not just the top one percent or making sure that our children inherit a fortune.
The adult Jesus, purportedly himself described the family business as taking care of the poor, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and those in prison, and welcoming strangers. I think that we too often, like Jack, forget what business we are truly in.
We are family.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Sister Sledge – We Are Family (Official Music Video)
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