Waiting on a call from God

Waiting on a Call from God

So here I was sitting in a little donut/boba shop... I love that these exist by the way... just getting my sugar fix and trying something new. And in walks in this nervous teenage girl, a black girl with a handful of giant pixie sticks, and after a pause she just starts making her pitch, hardly able to annunciate herself. She hands me a little card and I figure out what's going on. Solicitation to support a cause. In this case, a religious sober living home for men. Be saved from your addiction by giving yourself to Jesus Christ. Okay. I'll give. This girl deserves credit just for talking to me, and I try to reward that kind of behavior, to help people come out of their shell. The way I should. Maybe I'm trying to save myself. But that's an essay for another day.
I thought for a second about giving her coins, but I decided against it. This was a good cause, and a small one. They needed and deserved more. And so did she. I reach into my wallet, there are no ones. So I hand her a five. In my hunt for lodging and employment I am keenly aware of my excess cash, my bountiful blessings, and $5 is not too much to share. And the girl was so surprised by this, that bless her heart, she asked me if I wanted change. I said no. This could be her big prize of the day. She asked me if I wanted any candy. I took a giant pixie stick. Why? Because they are just so ridiculous, and I don't think I've seen one, let alone had one, in years.
What I will remember most from this encounter was how shredded her annunciation was, I'm not sure you could call it an accent, maybe she just doesn't speak much or it was an effect of the terrible nervousness or maybe thats just how the people in her community talk, but I hope talking to new people will help her practice more understandable diction. The other thing I will remember is how she called me sister. I was invited into her community. And maybe its a ploy, one of the psychological schemes used to get people to donate, but here's the problem. A girl that young, with a face that innocent, and a pitch that desperate, rooted in faith, cannot call a person her sister without believing it herself. She believes that I am in her community, especially since we are now joined in the support of a just cause. And that is how we are going to break the race barriers that still divide one of the most racially rich metropolises in the world.
I can't say for certain that this area is culturally rich. Perhaps because I have never witnessed the practice of culture. Perhaps the interfaith religious discussions at the colleges are the best place to look for evidence of such things. But how, on a day to day basis, is my life different from another person who lives here, on the basis of ancestry? Really the biggest "cultural" difference is defined by money. What you talk about, your daily activities, what you deem necessary for yourself, even the way you expect to be treated, seems to be largely defined by how much money you have. And if you live in a community of similarly rich or poor people, you create a culture, that surrounds either how to survive, or how to thrive. How to have fun on the least cash possible, or how to turn cash into land, and consequently security. How to jam as many people as possible into the least amount of space, or how to organize your prize possessions into the most aesthetically pleasing arrangement. These are the different concerns that define the discussions, thoughts, behaviors of people who live in this disturbingly overcrowded tenement paradise, and these are the things that define culture, I think.
There is one thing that pleases me, though, is the complete dissolution of cuisine barriers. I, for one, would now name as my favorite foods those things that come from far away lands, things that I never would have tasted in times when people didn't mingle, and the foods that would be considered to belong to me culturally have fallen to the bottom of the list. Perhaps its because I was fed my cultural food for most of my childhood and now I'm bored of it. All this to say, the human species is actually much smaller than people tend to realize. We are all much more closely related than is immediately obvious. But its time for us to come together, to mingle. Because we have a planet to save, and the first step to saving it is to discuss it. And how can we have a heartfelt, meaningful discussion if we cannot break bread together, and call each other sister.