I was on vacation when I heard the news —
Not Epstein files (those never come),
Not NOAA finally stabilizing under climate collapse pressure (don’t hold your breath),
Not even something as whimsical as health insurance making sense (a girl can hallucinate).
No. It was Coke.
Apparently — and only in some blessed markets —
Coca-Cola Classic might be switching back to real sugar.
And I paused. Took a breath.
And in a moment of what I can only call spiritual clarity, thought:
Well… at least there’s that.
We live in a world where institutional betrayal is a daily multivitamin.
Transparency arrives in breadcrumbs —
while the full loaf of accountability molds in some locked government basement next to the Ark of the Covenant and decent public transit.
We ask about climate collapse and get scone recipes written by an algorithm.
We beg for safety and are handed a 404 error and a FEMA brochure stapled to a wet sandwich.
But hey.
Cane sugar’s back.
Just like the Coke we smuggle up from Mexico.
(Shout-out to my Arizona saints who know the sacrament of glass-bottle redemption.)
There’s a quiet spiritual art in naming absurd blessings.
Not the toxic positivity kind.
The survivor kind.
The kind that says:
“The prophet’s still on voicemail, but someone brought a casserole.”
We were promised revelations.
We got soft launches.
We asked for reform.
We got Juneteenth ice cream at Walmart and forgot who owns the trademark.
We begged for truth.
We got tweets about UFO hearings and no follow-up.
But —
we got cane sugar in the soda again.
It doesn’t fix anything.
It doesn’t forgive anything.
But damn it —
it tastes like something honest.
The theologians call it prevenient grace.
That grace shows up before we do — unearned, uninvited.
Some people find it in scripture.
Some in a friend’s steady hand.
And some of us?
This week?
We find it in a bodega cooler near the border.
Because when the headlines are a firehose of gaslighting,
sometimes your tongue remembers what your soul forgot:
That soda used to taste like joy instead of compliance.
That not everything sacred has to be grand.
That cane sugar isn’t salvation —
but it’s a carbonated Eucharist
for a generation that survives on crumbs.
No, we still don’t have the files.
We still don’t have justice.
And the hurricanes? Still unsupervised.
But for this tiny moment —
the fizz is real.
The sweetness is honest.
And grace tastes like Mexico in a bottle.
Maybe that’s enough.
For now.
