The rain pours down the streets of Chicago. Falling idly from the gray black clouds, it hits each skyscraper with a thud. The thunder booms. Lightening. Puddles of water, murky gray and green from the dirt of sidewalks, stream quickly into the sewers. It moves away from sight and sound. Away from experience.

This experience, me with the members of Jordan Interfaith Action, the Chicago Youth Council, and Interfaith Youth Core's staff will be the same. Just one rainstorm in the life of a city. Just one week of my life.

Talking about our faith, what brought us here, and why. Discussion after visiting a Buddhist temple, a Jewish synagogue, and a Hindu temple. What we saw, how we felt. The connection between all of them and me. And perhaps what is discussed even more: the differences between all of them and me. The power of those differences.

The fact is that we can be friends with those blinding differences. Differences that people usually kill each other over.

We joke around on a school bus on the way to service projects, on the stage performing our time with refugee children from all over the world, in dorm rooms in the University Center of Chicago. We laugh over stereotypes, over language barriers, over all-encompassing cultural differences.

This week has been about those jokes, that laugher -- because of our never-ending hunger to change the world.