Hello World!!!

Insert Laura Ingalls and Nellie...

I’m fresh off taking my 9-year-old nephew to the V-103 “For Sisters Only” event yesterday…When I first asked him to hang out with his 37-year-old aunt, he was actually excited…until he discovered where I was taking him…As we walked around in the throng of women perusing vendors selling weave products, jewelry, clothing, etc.,  he declared, “They weren’t lying when they said for sisters only.” Then I felt bad…I guess I shouldn’t have taken the boy down there, huh?…It was a sneaky thing to do I admit…I had asked my boyfriend to go too, and he said, “No.” And then he added,”I don’t know any guys that have ever gone there.” I hope I haven’t scarred my nephew for life…Anywho…

Sooo on to the topic of the day…Have you ever tried to go incognito as a Christian? I do from time to time…Not that I’m ashamed of being a Christian or anything but sometimes I want to keep my thoughts to myself and let the events of the day or night unfold unfettered by my world view…Maybe my last sentence doesn’t make sense but I think it will as I continue to write, so continue to read on…So a few weeks back during my L.A. vacay, a friend and I went to a bar one night in Manhattan Beach…Since both of us are kind of homebodies, our intention was just to hang out for a bit so we could say that we hung out in L.A. past midnight and get back to our hotel room within a couple of hours or so…sad, I know, but true…so we put on some print dresses believing that we were going to a kind of neighborhood bar on par with the bar at Bennigan’s or something…we had inquired at our hotel about such a place and thought we had dressed appropriately…We.were.wrong…

As the cab sped away behind us and we walked up to bar, which was on the bottom floor of another hotel, we realized that we may not get past the proverbial “velvet rope” and that we could be stranded…In fact, the guy, looking like “Suave Dave” in his thin black suit, stationed at the front door, literally started looking at us from the soles of our shoes to the crown of our heads…I guess we didn’t make the cut…We weren’t swank enough to hang out with the posh crowd downstairs and he motioned for us to go upstairs with the more casual crowd…It was all good though…Upstairs was an open air bar with a pool in the center…And we still felt like “country goes to city” in our print dresses plus everyone else was white…not that I’ve never been the only black person in a crowd of people different from me before…but let’s keep it real…but when you are in a closed in space with people who are different from you for whatever reason, you never know what the result could be…Just ask my nephew about “For Sisters Only!”

Soo, I’m taking too long to tell this story…let me speed it up…Although I have a man and my friend is on a man fast, no one wants to be the girl in the bar or the club that no dude steps to…And we were afraid that would be the case as no one could probably see past our “Little House on the Prairie” print dresses and my flip flops that I have worn as shower shoes at the gym…(Really, looking back, I was wrong for venturing out past 9 p.m. with some flip flops anyway — particularly at my age…)

But lo and behold, a guy steps to my friend and starts chatting her up and it’s obvious from the animation in his eyes and voice, he is actually interested…I guess in support of his boy, his friend steps to me and starts making conversation…but I sense in his demeanor and tone that he is merely being polite…It’s all good though…as I said, before, I gotta man…As we start talking, it’s clear that dude has some mula…now, keep in mind that I had made a decision to not wear my “christian suit” so I was letting dude talk without saying anything real about myself…Anyway, he told me that he lived on a house on the beach and that he was the president or something like that of some Internet company…Yeah, he was braggin’ a bit but I sensed that he was telling the truth…He told me his boy was from the East Coast and was visiting him for the first time in L.A.

So dude, who looked to be about my age, explains to me that he is bored with his current career and would like to explore developing a Web portal though which different people could find out about different charitable organizations across the world and give to support them…Well that was cool enough that he said that, right? So he asked me what charitable organizations did I like…I muttered, “CARE, World Vision, etc.” I was still drying to maintain my look of “disinterested cool.” Then the heavens opened..well not really, but dude’s eyes expanded and he said, “Are you spiritual or religious?” Inside, I was like, “Man, I’m trying to be incognito…” But the Holy Spirit said, “Share.” So I said, “I guess I’m both…” In less than an hour, dude told me how he wanted to make a difference with his life, how he grew up Catholic but stopped going to church and how L.A. was so fake…I was like, “Really.”

I would like to say that I managed to get my Bible out of my purse and read a few scriptures with him in the middle of the bar but that is not what happened…Leaving my huge purse in the hotel room was probably the only fashionable decision I made that night, and I don’t carry a Bible in my purse anyway…Instead, we had a real conversation and I came out as a Christian…

I don’t know what will happen to dude…Maybe I can find out from my girl…The guy that chatted her up asked for her number…I would like to think that when that guy got home from the bar, he got on his knees and prayed to know Jesus…But I can’t call it…but at least I was faithful, albeit reluctantly, to declare the name of Jesus…And maybe as he keeps having encounters of the spiritual kind, dude will stop chatting up  fake girls in the bar and have a real relationship with Jesus…

I think Jesus was proud of me in my print dress and flip flops…

Any thoughts?