Life is More Fun with Roommates

Case in point. This is us (well, three of us - from the left: Greg, Jess, Charlie) shopping at Cub. While purchasing the ingredients for Appletinis, which we then forgot to make, we walked by the Halloween aisle.

Today, I celebrated having male roommates by throwing a football around (which is significantly more complicated than it looks on TV), grilling bratwursts marinated in beer, watching football, and drinking a Diet Cherry-Vanilla Dr. Pepper (well, that last bit was all me).

And my roommates have been helping me church-shop, too. Having spent several years analyzing "how we do church" academically and spiritually and everything in between, I have some pretty strong ideas of the kind of congregation to which I'd like to belong. So far we have hit three of the five-ish churches that are close enough for comfort, and today's was a spectacular, phenomenal disaster. It took us 10 minutes to find parking, and since I had gotten us lost on the way, we had to sneak into the service while they were passing the peace at the beginning (the beginning? weird). It went downhill from there. The sermon was, we agreed later, a complete train-wreck. The most memorable illustration was the TEN FULL MINUTES that the pastor spent expounding on the fiscal value of children, both dead and alive. Like an accident on the side of the road, though, you couldn't NOT pay attention, just to see where she was going next on this horrible, horrible path to Sermon Hell. We deteriorated from making snide whispered comments to one another behind our hands to actually passing notes written on the back of the bulletins and giggling. Witness:

- "What is the POINT of this sermon?"
+ "Ummm... point = dead children are worthless?"
- "Not to Jesus!"
+ "Right, he collects them."

And then, simultaneously,
- "She (the preacher)'s like the crazy aunt everyone avoids..." and
+ "This woman needs a therapist."

We barely made it to the car afterwards before we burst into the kind of laughter that ruins funerals. It was schadenfreude, pure and unholy. We all rather sheepishly admitted that we had each considered just walking out in the middle of the sermon, but didn't know how to explain it to the other ones. I haven't had the giggles like that in years. (It was pretty disconcerting, though, on many levels.)

Anyway... roommates are fun.