As I sit here at 8:53 in the morning, in the junk food joint where I do much of my work, I have an idea of what to write about, but am getting stuck on how to start it. So, for the next few paragraphs or so, I’ll simply make some random reflections, until my brain and fingers decide to cooperate.

First of all, I see some miserable faces, as it seems that some people, actually in this restaurant the majority – hate mornings. To them and others of their sort, overcast fall mornings in Canada are cold and heavy – and even to me, there is a slightly looming sense that winter is near; and a nip in the air that bites at my nose. And with this to set the environmental mood, I can see five people sitting alone in their booths, reading the morning paper, and vacant in their expressions. I see them munching on their breakfasts, playing with the lids of their coffee cups, and simply trying to kill a few minutes before the work day begins.

Contrast with this the workers behind the counter and in the kitchen. They are bright and bushy tailed, zipping around like little wound up toys, and they have mostly one thing in common…no, not their uniforms – but the fact they are black. Young men and women, who should be in college and university; working at 9:00 a.m., serving miserable faces. And all this, for minimum wage.

I think of the waste here; as these young men and women are in the first stages of lives that will be a constant run from paycheque to paycheque…ones where they will have to deal with both management, other staff and customers, and ones where they will always have to be on their best behavior, and do exactly what they are told to do – regardless of who’s right or wrong.

As I look over at the now large lineup, I see five obese people lining up to buy sodium laden, cholesterol filled, fat soaked non-food; and then to pay for it, force it down their throats, and then head off to who knows where. Again, I see the loneliness…and I just want to get up, take the lady sitting behind me by the arm, and lead her to the man sitting next to her. And from there, I want to introduce them and say, “Here! Here’s a new friend for you. Don’t be lonely; just sit and talk.” But off course, that will never happen. The media, and the politicians and the rest, have created a society of distrust. The media by sensationalizing crime rather than shaming the politicians and other authorities who should be doing something about it, and the politicians, by not having the courage to fight it in the first place.

I also see goodness on this morning, as I see a Pilipino couple sitting and chatting with a blackman. If I had ten cents for everytime I’d seen that in my life, I’d have over two dollars. Maybe. Still, things are getting better here. I see a black couple having a friendly conversation; they look middle-class, and then he takes a fast look at his watch, which tells me he has somewhere to go to. And sure enough, he rises crisply, folds his newspaper, and the two of them walk out. I contrast this with the ones behind the counter who haven’t paused for even a second since I arrived here, and I feel sad. I want to give them a paper with my phone number on it and say to them, “Phone me so we can get you into school and start you a career.” But, I‘ve done this before, and the obstacles were large. Many of them hadn’t graduated high school – many of them weren’t anywhere near graduating high school…and some of them had already given up on trying to get anywhere in life. And it’s at these times, that I play a little game in my mind that I call: What if I ruled the world? – or in this case, just Canada.

First of all, I would honor the blacks by making studies of how the blacks lived during slavery, compulsory. Each kid would have to read, see, write about and feel, the pain that blacks carry in their hearts. And I would bend over backwards to get exchange programmes going, where white and Asian kids would live with blacks, go to school in black areas, and socialize with them. I would make it impossible to tell the difference between a school in a poor black area and one in a better one, and I would make scholarships to blacks flow like water.

As I take a moment to cool down so that this article won’t become a rant, I think of the numerous taxis which have passed by since I got here this morning. I look at the drivers, and sometimes walk up and talk to them; and they tell me of the hard lives they have. Most are new immigrants, with little or no English skills; many have families to support; and they have to work all hours and suffer all forms of abuse from their customers. I know that some in the middle-class will say that if they don’t like it here, then they can go home. But that’s not good enough. Especially from Christians. The poor taxi driver is a man (and sadly the occasional woman), and he or she deserves respect. They need to be treated with dignity. It isn’t the bank manager or accountant who deserves our esteem; it’s the poor little overworked taxi driver. After all, he’s the one working in a degrading job, at all hours, to feed his family.

As I continue sitting here and clicking away, the morning crowd is gone and the pre-lunchtime folk have arrived. And while there are now a few mothers with their little kids, and some retired couples; the rest have the same blank faces, and are still just passing time. The staff are the same ones from early morning, and they are still black, and are still running around frantically. Two fifteen minute breaks in an eight hour shift; big deal. However at this moment, my mind is now on the subject of the day: Joy. A person named Joy that is.

As mentioned before, we now give out about 2000 flyers each weekend, and one great day, one of them ended up in Joy’s building. A yucky, plaster-ripped-from-the-walls-ceiling-cockroach-unstable-neighbors building. A wallpaper and carpet from thirty years ago, and infested with anti-social types type of building. But, as corny as it is to say this; flowers grow in places like this. Wild, hardy – survivor flowers. And Joy is just such a flower. She phoned one day to tell me she had received our flyer and was a fellow Christian, and from there, stated that she wished to have us pray for her, because she was about to be laid off from her factory job. And I was thrilled (really), because to think that our little flyer had somehow ended up the hands of a person, many miles away from where the members of our group live – and was helping someone, was a great feeling.

So, with that in mind, we prayed together on the phone – with me fumbling through it because I’m not very good at praying, and she saying it beautifully, in her rich South American accent. As history is a hobby with me, I get very emotional when I hear this or a Caribbean accent, because I know that Joy, being black, is the descendant of slaves. I feel deep anger over how blacks are forced to live, and burning anger when I actually see a black being mistreated.

Our group serves the Lord in a few little ways, and one of them is making free resumes for new immigrants and other poor people; so, as soon as we had finished our prayer, we got down to business. A resume for Joy. As I sat there and listened to her give me the information, I was made happy to hear she had completed high school and had run her own grocery store; but was saddened to hear of the miserable jobs she had also had to do over the years. I also learned Joy had seven children back home to support. As I continued to type the information, I got to know my new friend better, and felt both proud and blessed. Joy had gotten up at daybreak each morning to go to the market to buy the produce for her little store; and she had worked long hours at it, just to come home and feed, clothe, and put to bed the kids. And all of this done with Christian love.

Shortly after we brought the first batch of resumes over to her she got a job in a senior’s home, where she cleaned rooms and served up food; and this, I believe, was and is the essence of humility. No education, no power, no status – just cleaning rooms and serving up food. Oh, and one more thing: Joy also gives a painfully large amount of her pay to her church each week. Willingly.

As the weeks passed, I kept in contact with Joy, and was always happy to receive her messages of encouragement and hope. But more importantly, I was brought low by her dignity, and devotion to the Lord.

Sadly, or happily, Joy lost her job a week or so ago, so last night, I went over to Joy’s place with fifty brand-spanking new resumes and ten cover letters to get her back into the fight. Our fight, is against the Devil, and helping a fellow Christian like Joy get a job, is a small part in that fight. As we sat there talking, Joy played a video of her recent baptism – a good old fashioned “Hallelujah,” “Praise the Lord,” type of baptism. In the video, I saw beautiful black ladies and young girls in their finest Sunday dresses, and men and kids in their rigid uncomfortable suits, with starched shirts; and I saw people swaying to the gospel music, many with great big happy toothy white smiles. But most importantly, I saw real Christians. (I even saw some whites, which shows that things – thank God – really finally might – be changing.)

As we continued to watch the video and talk, I asked Joy if she had happened to call the three people I had asked her to call and comfort, and she told me she had. In fact, she had just gotten off the phone to one of them a few minutes before I had arrived. The evening then continued with Joy telling me of the deep love she felt now that she had accepted Jesus into her heart, and what a great feeling it was to trust in the Lord – completely. This affected me much, as I knew she had no work.

As it was getting a little late, I asked her to tell me a bit about her life, because I wanted to understand her more – and then, out nowhere – she told me she had escaped her country and come to Canada as a refugee, because her husband had beaten her. She had had to take out a restraining order out against him. And as we again talked about her kids…she told me how her heart burned with longing to have them with her.

It’s now 11:28 and I’ve just had a fun conversation with a couple of seniors. George is a widower, and Joyce – who in the course of our conversation said hi to at least ten people, is a widow. They met about a year ago and have been steady companions ever since. So much for my theory that everyone in this place is lonely. As much as I’d like to talk about those two (which I’ll leave for a future article); it’s somebody else I have on my mind, an Arabic friend of mine, named Mary. Mary (who doesn’t want me to use her real name), sat down a few minutes ago, and while eating her muffin and drinking her coffee, smiled and greeted me. But first, who is Mary?

In case the reader has read any of my previous articles, he or she may be familiar with a character I named “Sammy” in an article title: “A few lines about Sammy.” And if that is the case, the reader will remember that Sammy is an extremely nice an intelligent man, who is close to homeless, and whom I visit once a week or so just to keep him part of the world and to give him dignity. And it was on one of my visits to him that I saw him wearing a new shirt, and two women – a mother and daughter, sitting next to and talking to him. When I walked up to them, he proudly introduced Mary and her daughter as his friends, and told me that they had bought the shirt for him. I had seen them before, and I think had had a brief conversation, but this was our first real introduction.

Mary and her daughter are from Lebanon, and are Christians. And Christians from Lebanon – a country that has been torn apart by religious civil war for decades, are ones that I really admire. They are not the contemporary, change the Bible, anything and everything goes type of pseudo-quasi Christians that are a dime a dozen here; they are the real thing.

As I have gotten to know them more, I am blessed with what good examples they are of humble Christianity. With them, there is no status, no greed, no money worshipping – Just God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. When I ask them to pray for me, they do; and when I need a couple of minutes with some decent people, they are there. And further, when I need our flyers given out, they are also ready and willing to help. (Which I wish the same could be said for some of my other friends.)

On this particular morning, I have just finished a conversation with Mary, where she told me of the hardships her family endured as Christians when the Lebanese Civil War started, and how they had to escape to Saudi Arabia. But what struck me most, was the story she told of coming home one evening from visiting friends, just to have the door knock a few minutes later, and two men then come in and take her husband sway. Mary looked everywhere for her husband and had, at the same time, to look after six kids; until one day – three months later, he was set free. She then told of coming to Canada and how blessed her family have been ever since. Praise God.

What I find interesting about the two people I have talked about, is how their unshakable faith and trust in God have seen them through tough times; and how they rely on prayer to survive. The prayers of these little people, I believe, reach God’s ears.

It’s now 1:00 on the dot, and the teenagers are heading back for their afternoon nap at school. But even in that there’s a lesson. The Chinese kids all sat together in a corner by themselves and spoke Chinese, while the blacks and whites were vocal and racially intermixed. The self-imposed segregation of the Chinese kids, if not stopped, will lead them to isolate themselves throughout life; which will lead to distrust, and, well, racism. Getting them into a good interracial church is a good step towards stopping this.

Time to wrap it up. People in our modern world are purposelessness and lonely; and whereas the church no longer holds the community together – because most people have walked away from it or because the church (not all churches) have betrayed Christ’s teachings; the junk food restaurant does a very poor job in fixing the problem. Next, good people – like Joy, Sammy, Mary and her daughter, exist; and finally, if kids don’t integrate as kids; they won’t as adults. And the answer, off course, to the above problems is Christ. Jesus will take away our loneliness, and kill our racism, but it’s up to us to take the step.

A last minute note. It’s now 8:28 p.m. and I’ve just dropped in to the same place to relax a moment; when on my way in, Billy presented me with some chocolates because he had heard the yesterday was my birthday. Thanks Sammy; you’re a real gentleman.