Nostalgic

Today was a Sunday, which means church. And that means Maywood Evangelical Free Church or, That Church I Went Too When I Was Wee.

This was a crazy experience. First of all, it was like a total nostalgia overload. The carpets were the same, the classrooms, the coat racks, the stairs, the foyer, the sanctuary, most of the people. It was all like just the same as five years ago when I went here. Second, everything was so small. It was like, "ohmagoodness, Maywood got hit by a shrink ray." Like, I mean, those words actually went through my head.

The ceilings were way lower. The classroom gates were knee-height. The coat racks were short. The foyer was claustrophobic. And the sanctuary was tiny! I remember a giant sanctuary that could easily fit like six thousand or seven thousand people with elbow space, and a ceiling so high that if you managed to get to the pinnacle and then you fell, you could live an entire life in the time it took to fall.

This was not that church.

It was so much smaller. The walls were closer in, the pews were crammed into each other, the ceiling fans almost brushed our heads. It wasn't the same church!

Now, the characteristics were all the same. There was that same soundboard that my cool friends got to use. There was the white stage that I wished was a big huge mint on many a Sunday because the little white mints my mom had were entirely inadequate. And all the people who sang were the same people, just barely perceptibly aged.

But it just wasn't the same church.

That aside, everyone inside the church was the same. We'd been gone for five years and in that time my brothers and I got a lot taller, my parents aged a lot, my dad put on some weight, my mom got shorter, Cole got facial hair, I got handsome, Seth got broad shoulders and Grant-- didn't actually change much.

Which means he fit in well at Maywood because every single person was exactly the same! They all went to the same church, wore the same styles of clothes, sang the same kinds of songs, listened to the same types of sermons, had the same faces. Weird. Weird weird weird.

This led me to some ponderings about spiritual stagnation I'll probably elaborate on later.

But anyways, Maywood was strange because it was like my family's house. On the one hand, everything is so familiar and just the way I remember it from five years ago. And on the other hand, so much stuff is different that it's not my church any more.

So that was my little piece of nostalgia for the day, if that is the appropriate word which it might not be.

Segue.

After church, I got to meet up with some friends at the Culver's right across from my family's house. It was cool because I made them drive all the way from their church to meet me there because I have to get ferried around by my family. And then it turned out their church was actually closer to Culver's than Maywood. And then we had butterburgers!

I had an intramural basketball game back at Northwestern and plenty of studying to do, so I decided that we should just eat from 12:30 to 1:30 to get to briefly see each other's handsome/beautiful faces again, and then I would leave and be back at Northwestern in time for the 3 o'clock game.

This was the stupidest idea.

1) It takes more than an hour and a half to get to Northwestern from Rockford, and when I got there I would have to unpack and change and get over to the gym. And leaving Culver's at 1:30 still entailed going home and packing up. No way that's possible.

2) I hadn't even started doing financial aid and tax stuff with my dad, which was one of the main reasons I went home for the weekend. I still needed to do that before I left.

3) We ended up talking for four and a half hours straight without pausing.

Stupid, stupid idea.

The talking was great, though. It was just three of us, and although one of these friends was a lifetime-ever-since-we-were-in-diapers-we-were-best-buds friend, the other was a girl I barely knew except from random encounters throughout our lives, so I anticipated the conversation being kind of awkward and eagerly abandoned.

Instead we discoursed on everything from relationships to parties to judgmentalism to college plans to relationships without stopping for breath.

It was awesome.

By the conclusion of this prolonged conversational encounter, I knew these friends ten times as well and as a bonus I broadened my perspectives on drugs & drinking.

(But not very much.)

But anyways, it was a great afternoon and then I went home and slaved furiously and FAFSA told me I would be a prince one day, and then I managed to leave by 6:15, and the timing on this was just perfect because right as I pulled up to Hinman (my dorm), a group of friends from community group appeared at the door like elves to ferry my luggage to my room and then I accompanied them to Whole Foods for no discernable purpose and I felt like I had good friends at college, which is a good thing to come back to.

And I didn't do any rapping today, but I discussed this habit with my mom in the car on the way back to Northwestern and she confirmed that my dad disapproves.

I will prove them wrong.