A McMuffin MacGuffin: How McDonalds Breakfast (Mostly) Explains Grace
Three-thousand, four-hundred, and fifty-four words about breakfast and Jesus…
Not too long ago, I took a ride to Fostoria, Ohio, a quaint town of 13,053 known for railroads (over 100 trains pass through every day) and the former glory of being a glassmaking hub in the 1800s.
It seemed like a fine place, to be honest. A quick glance at the “top things to do in Fostoria” on Yelp offered a bowling alley and psychic readings as possible attractions. So…you get it. It’s fine. In fact, that should be a t-shirt they sell.
Fostoria: It’s Fine!
I was in Fostoria along with Stef and Brixton one Saturday morning for no good reason beyond being together. Stef had a client who needed something in a home they were buying so we decided to load up and tag along for the 27-mile trip. As Stef did whatever she was doing with her client, Brixton and I passed time in the car just chit-chatting. Brixton, having been praised for her patience in waiting, sensed an opportunity for a reward and asked if we could get a blue slushee (Slushy?) from McDonalds on the way home.
I said “sure” (rightly assuming that a town as fine as Fostoria had a McDonalds) and soon enough we had Stef back and we were on our way in search of those ubiquitous Golden Arches.
Having found the local McDonalds, we pulled into the drive through line at 10:26am. As it was close enough to lunchtime and we had a 30 minute drive home, I suggested that we just order food while we were there (it was going to be a busy day) and knock out two birds with the same stone. And bonus! It was still breakfast time. As I’m sure you’re well aware, the menu changeover from breakfast to lunch famously happens at 10:30am. With four whole minutes to spare, I was beyond thrilled that we’d be able to enjoy the wonders of a McDonalds breakfast.
Now I don’t know how you feel about McDonalds breakfast, but I have some thoughts. Okay, I have one thought. It’s delicious.
And we can admit something right up front. It’s not good for you. And you certainly don’t feel good after you eat it. But there is something about it that is just undeniably crave-able.
Maybe it’s the Sausage and Egg Biscuit™ you desire with that perfectly folded scrambled egg on the buttery, crumbly biscuit. Perhaps you’re a Big Breakfast™ guy or gal, needing perfect pancakes to go with your heart staples. Or, if you’re like me, you ride hard for the Sausage McMuffin with Egg™.
As much as I hate to admit it publicly, I have to believe that the Sausage McMuffin with Egg™ is one of the most delicious food products ever created. That toasty English muffin, melty cheese, seared sausage patty, and perfectly circular fried egg - it’s fast food perfection.
And let’s not get this inimitable bit of breakfast goodness confused with other McMuffin varieties. For instance, in some countries you can get a Bacon and Egg McMuffin™. My friends, this is not a viable option for any self-respecting person. It should not even be allowed. Bacon is a complementary meat, providing a salty snap to a toothsome cheeseburger. The BLT crowd won’t like to hear it, but bacon is plainly a sandwich enhancer, an additive presence. Bacon can win best supporting protein all day. But don’t try to make it the star.
While we’re on the subject of bacon, can we have a quick word with Canada? The traditional Egg McMuffin™ famously arrives with a slice of Canadian bacon on it. But we all know that it’s just ham, right? I mean, if we can just call anything bacon, then the device you’re reading this on is bacon. Clouds are actually made from bacon. Whatever. There are no rules in the pork byproduct nomenclature game.
Where American bacon is taken from the pig’s belly, Canadian bacon is actually back bacon that is cured, smoked, cooked, and trimmed. You know, like ham. Lunch meat. Canadians, for their part, don’t call it Canadian Bacon anymore than we call our version American Bacon. I don’t blame them - who would want that meat attached to their national identity? Instead, they call it Back Bacon. And what do they call our bacon? Kevin Bacon. Confused yet? Me, too.
The point of this entirely unnecessary tangent is that no bacon of any variety from any country should be the star meat in a McMuffin™. Either get your McMuffin™ with sausage or admit your sheer lunacy and order one of those syrup-infused McGriddles like some sort of circus performer.
What were we talking about?
Ah, yes, the world’s most delicious heart-stopping, organ-grinding, fast-food breakfast creation ever developed, the Sausage McMuffin with Egg™.
Not only is it scrumtrulescent but, because it’s breakfast, I can carry forward the illusion that it’s somehow healthier than whatever burger I might order at lunch. After all, it’s smaller! And there is an egg involved!
(The gloriously delicious Sausage McMuffin with Egg™ has 480 calories and 20 grams of protein. The Big Mac™ runs 550 calories and 25 grams of protein. Ignoring all of the other wildly relevant nutrition stats, cholesterol implications, and saturated fat problems of this heavily processed franken-food, we can see that these are basically nutritionally equal and that breakfast under the Golden Arches will kill you just as quickly as lunch. I am undeterred by these facts.)
So of course, at 10:26am, I started salivating in line. Brixton would have her slushee (Slushie?) and I would get the gift from the heavens that is a Sausage McMuffin with Egg™.
Only the line was moving slowly. Too slowly. Oh, you know this existential dread.
It was 10:28am and we had only moved up one space. We were still two cars from the little ordering kiosk, still 20 feet away from breakfast transcendence. And this was when the crazy thoughts started showing up.
Should I get out of line and run in to order at the counter?
Should I beep the horn a little just as an encouragement to the person order in front of me to order faster?
Should I actually bump the car in front of me just to intimidate them into leaving the line altogether?
Should I break into the back of the McDonalds and fight the staff for the right to make my own Sausage McMuffin with Egg™?
10:29am.
Trouble.
My stomach was growling. My hope was waning. And then, just as I was beginning to believe my breakfast dreams had been dashed, like the Red Sea parting before Moses and his people, the last car between me and my dreams - fresh cracked eggs and delicious mass-produced sausage all snuggled in a toasty English muffin - finally moved. We were moving up in line! Right up to the kiosk! Ready to order! Hallelujah!
But (*cue ominous music here) before the lovely, young fast food employee could impersonally and robotically greet me with comically dry and flat rendition of “Welcome to McDonalds - go ahead and start your order whenever you’re ready”…
…it all ended.
In the blink of an eye, like lightning from the depths of Gehenna itself, the breakfast items cleared from the digital menu boards.
The screens went all white for a split second as the pixels shifted from scrumptious eggs and sausage to:
Big Macs. Quarter Pounders. McNuggets. Happy Meals.
And Sadness. So much sadness.
Stef and Brixton saw it happening. Seeing the utter devastation on my face, they instinctively attempted to rally. They tried to console me.
It’s fine, they said.
Just get lunch, they said.
I couldn’t even hear them. My ears rang with loss. My heart raced - was it from the adrenaline of this tragedy or just in preparation for the profoundly unhealthy foods I was planning to consume? I sat stunned, bereft. And it was at that moment that I was welcomed to McDonalds by a 17 year-old drive-through worker who had no idea what kind of emotionally charged culinary carnage lay on the other side of that tinny speaker.
Go ahead and order whenever you’re ready, she said.
I refused. Because of course I did.
I would not order. I could not order. How could I ever be ready again?
I would not be made into some Cirque du Soleil curiosity, jumping through arbitrary timing hoops in order to have the right to give a massive global company my hard-earned dollars in exchange for a deliciously drawer-warmed Sausage McMuffin with Egg™. I’d rather be hungry than to cave into these temporal shenigans. Since when did they decide I needed to earn my breakfast with some artificial punctuality?
(And we all know that, at precisely 10:31am, they have a bunch of circle-shaped eggs and sausages just sitting in those disgusting yellow warming drawers where they keep all of their food. Why not sell them until they’re all gone? No one knows. I asked. There are no answers. Ronald McDonald - do you care? Ronald, do you even hear me?!?)
We got Brixton a blue slushee (Slüççi?) and we left with much weeping and gnashing of teeth.
*fade to black
It is at this point in the story where it is imperative for us to revisit the glorious period of our collective national history (and unhealth) that was the All Day Breakfast™ era at McDonalds. You remember this, right?
In a move of staggering genius, from 2015 until the pandemic stole it from us in March of 2020, McDonalds decided to allow people to order select breakfast items all day long. And this, friends, was the golden age of the Golden Arches. I went years without ordering lunch at McDonalds. After all, the pearly gates of McMuffin™ Shangri-La had opened.
10:28am.
2:41pm.
9:16pm.
It didn’t matter what time it was. The McMuffin™ was always ready for me and I was always ready to order. It was always available, never guarded behind the walls of time. I didn’t have to earn it with my punctuality. I just had full, unfettered McMuffin™ access. Oh, the good ol’ days.
This All Day Breakfast was wonderful for metaphorical reasons, of course. Obviously breakfast is delicious. But All Day Breakfast was really a lot like an entirely different development in my life.
You see, I grew up in religion. I was hardly unfamiliar with church.
I went to Catholic school for NINE years. My friends, I was in church A LOT.
And yet it always felt like whatever they were selling was just a little beyond my grasp. To me, it felt like I what I imagined it might feel like to be dropped into a swamp in total darkness. I would get a little momentum and then crash into religiosity, some lifeless remnant of what was supposed to be. The murky water of righteousness was replete with rules like mangroves growing up from below and regulations like willows drooping down from above. Impossible to navigate and seemingly without purpose, I was interminably tangled by what I couldn’t see.
And listen, Jesus was there - at least in statue form, hauntingly hovering, hanging from a massive wooden cross above the altar. Mary was there, too. Lots of saints and a rotating band of well-intentioned priests. Plenty of nuns. Good ol’ Sister Angela had me collecting Holy Cards in first grade like they were Mickey Mantle rookie cards. Recess was spent trying to flip a St. Peter rookie card for a multitude of lesser cards highlighted by St. Ignatius of Loyola and Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.
Basically, I had lots of apparently holy people to look up to, aspire towards, learn from, etc…
And there was the promise of love at every turn. God’s love. Real love. It was right there for the taking, they said.
If…I could just do my part.
It would require some sacrifice, I was told. Discipline would definitely be needed. And, of course, one must stay within the bounds of the well-crafted rules and rituals. But if I could manage it, if I could just walk the straight line, there was a love waiting beyond my wildest imagination.
Only that love was always just out of reach.
There were ritualistic regulations to adhere to - confession here and absolution there. Proper taking of sacraments and certain procedures in how to conduct oneself. There were, for lack of a better phrase, lots of hoops on the pathway to this love.
And I spent the first two decades of my life trying (and failing) to jump through the hoops. I really tried. And here’s the thing - I know great people who found faith in the same traditions and places that I could not. So this story is not about the failure of a denomination or a faith tradition. It’s the story of my failure…and eventual rescue.
You see, my best attempts at being sacrificial living usually landed on selfishness anyway. My attempts at discipline too often developed into deception to cover my pride. If I can be honest with you, I spent most of my life attempting to look like I was doing the right thing while secretly trying to leverage that perception of righteousness to satisfy my own broken needs and desires.
I was relationally destructive - burning friends and too many young women along the way. Chasing some unattainable gratification or intimacy that was otherwise lacking in my life, I walked through life like a wildfire of confusion and hurt, leaving charred relationships and scorched earth behind me.
And, listen…I’d heard about grace and forgiveness and hope beyond my own failures. But I’d heard about them like I’d heard about a man walking on the moon. I believed in the concept and sort of understood how it might work, but had never experienced anything that would allow me to fully grasp the reality of the concept. Grace felt like watching Neil Armstrong bound across the lunar surface on a grainy black and white television. Good for him, I guess. Grace without the bounds of sin’s gravity. But my grubby, sinning hands could never get quite clean enough to hold such beauty.
Religion, the pursuit of love and grace and perhaps even this Jesus, left me unsatisfied at every turn.
To be honest, attempting to earn this grace and “live right” for Jesus felt like it was perpetually 10:31am in the line for McDonalds breakfast. No matter how hard I tried, I never could get it right. I never could measure up. White-knuckling my way through life, I never could earn what I was showing up begging for…
But there was a glimmer of hope. Somewhere along the way, a guy named Nat introduced me to Jesus.
Not religious Jesus.
Not spooky statue Jesus.
Not institutional Jesus.
Not if-you’ll-only-try-harder Jesus.
Real Jesus.
The Jesus of the Bible was a new and altogether wild Jesus to me. He was a unifier and divider. He was perfectly pure and yet he associated exclusively with flawed and unclean people. He was patient and still firm. He was compassionate and convicting. He was crystal clear and somehow shrouded in mystery. He warred against pagan brokenness and injustice and warred against the pomposity of religion all the same. He sat with sinners and scandalously shared meals with them. And then He told those same sinners to “go and sin no more.”
I was, for lack of a better word, gobsmacked to find out that THIS was the real Jesus.
Somewhere along the way, my aunt introduced me to a young firebrand of a preacher named Jeff. Week after week, he gave impassioned exhortations to not just know Jesus but to radically follow him. The preacher’s wife mailed me white sermon cassette tapes each week so I could sit in my dorm room in Austin, TX and stoke the flames of this new obsession.
Then one day that preacher introduced me to a white South African minister named Willie. Upon meeting him, Willie invited me to move 10,000 miles to live with him and work with him. And it was through Willie that, for the first time in my life, I started to understand what it meant to FOLLOW Jesus.
Now, to be clear, I was spending my days literally following Willie - mostly to get coffee and biscuits or to tuck away some Nandos. But Willie walked with Jesus. Willie knew the real Jesus. And Willie showed me how real life and the real Jesus crashed together in ways I never could have imagined. It was in those days that the Jesus I had “accepted” became the Jesus I was learning to love with my whole life. And, more importantly, I started to understand that Jesus might actually love ME.
This Jesus loved me with that love that had been promised before - only Jesus didn’t require the hoops. I found this love outside of liquor stores and squatter camps on the rough and tumble streets of Brixton, an inner city district of Johannesburg. And I found that the love I so yearned for DID, in fact, exist. And it DID require sacrifice and discipline. The love I longed to feel DID require that a straight line be walked.
Only it was Jesus who had to walk that straight line. Jesus had to live the life I was striving and failing to achieve. Jesus jumped through the hoops. Jesus lived the perfect, disciplined, selfless life.
And then, through his sacrificial death and resurrection, Jesus paid the price for my failure to measure up. Jesus, once and for all, set me free from religion and the rituals of righteousness. Instead, he invited me into grace, into the overflow of his goodness.
And this way, the Jesus Way, opened up the floodgates of life.
In Jesus, the love I longed for and was available all day every day. I went from drowning in a sea of religion to swimming in an ocean of grace.
It was no longer about my ability to be good enough - “clean” enough to earn grace - I never could get it all right. Instead it was about Jesus standing in for me, his goodness and cleanliness overwhelming my filthiness, fulfilling what I could not and then pouring out gracious love upon me.
I learned that I didn’t have to strive and achieve my way into heaven. Heaven came to earth in the form of Jesus to meet me in my brokenness, offer me healing, and invite to me to live out heaven on earth right here and now.
I guess, in a manner of speaking, what I am trying to say is that where religion had asked me to take on the impossible task of getting my life together and getting my order in by 10:29am, the true grace of Jesus said “I serve breakfast all day.”
He said something like this to his friends along the journey:
“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” - Jesus (Matthew 11:28-30 MSG)
Come in. Eat. Be full. Be glad. Leave your anxiety behind. Drop your righteousness at the door. There is no line and the feast of hope and gladness is always warm and ready for you.
***
I don’t know exactly who needed to hear all of that today, who needed so many words to be reminded of the grace offered in Jesus, but I figured I should tell you anyway.
Maybe the next time you’re hanging out watching trains in Fostoria or the next time you see the ubiquitous Golden Arches, you’ll do more than remember the deliciousness of the Sausage McMuffin with Egg™.
My prayer is that you’ll be reminded of real grace, the unearned favor and beauty and blessing of Jesus. It is always available.
- KB
***
PS - In case you were wondering, a MacGuffin is an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in and of itself. Under the right circumstances, even a McMuffin™ could be a MacGuffin.
