I have a little butterscotch story for you today.
This candy dish lives on the front counter of my son's auto repair shop. Customers love it. As you can see, it's stocked with a variety of candies. The chocolate usually goes first, mints and fruity candy like Jolly Ranchers and Tootsie Rolls go next. Then there are the butterscotches. When the dish is restocked, usually none or only one are added, but almost every time the dish ends up looking like this, with several of them piling up. Butterscotch, it seems, is not a very popular flavor.
So, why keep including it? Why not just forget the old-fashioned buttery sweetness?
Because there are a couple of regulars who come in who love them. If no butterscothes are in the dish, their disappointment is apparent. Often for them, it's that little golden disk or nothing.
The day I snapped this pic, seeing the dish overstocked - again - with them, I thought, "They may not be everyone's favorite, but they're someone's favorite," and felt oddly encouraged.
It occurred to me how like the butterscotch candies we can be.
It's natural to want to be liked, to be chosen. Countless stories have been told all through the ages, in most every art form, of feeling left out and the subsequent joy of being chosen. We've all been taught that we can't make everyone happy all the time. In reality, we can't make everyone happy ever.
What we can do is relax and just be ourselves. If we're a butterscotch, we have no need to wrap ourselves up in in a Hershey's chocolate wrapper, or a Tootsie Roll, Jolly Rancher, or mint candy wrapper in hopes of getting picked sooner. We can simply be a butterscotch and trust that our people will come along. They may not be a large crowd, but they'll love us.
Being comfortably ourselves may sometimes mean having lots of people choose us or other times it may mean sitting in the dish and waiting a while.
Occasionally, we may be discouraged and think we're no one's favorite. That's. Not. True! No matter how true it may feel. Even if we can't see anyone who loves us, we can trust that there's an infinite power in the universe, whom I believe is God, that loves us so deeply, tenderly, and personally, that if we allow ourselves to feel that love, we'll surely know we're a favorite.
That day that candy dish reminded me that not only is it okay to not be the popular one, it's a beautiful thing to be one person's favorite.