first church of haagen-dazs

I'm not very good at being a Christian. I'm not very good at trusting, waiting, hoping. I'm snarky and rude and often judgmental and proud. I have fallen out of the habit of daily Bible readings. I lose myself in anger and frustration. I don't have a Scripture reference or sermon illustration to answer every question.

I was raised in faith. My family attended church three or four times a week and visited church members every day. We were homeschooled. My best friends were youth group members. We prayed over every meal. Until i got to college, i hardly owned any secular music. I wore a purity ring and had vowed to abstain from sex until i was married.

I don't evangelize. Not in the grocery store, not at work, not at home. Of my four siblings, i am the only one who still identifies as "Christian". The other three all call themselves agnostics. I pray for them, not that they would be convicted of their sin and led to the truth, but that Jesus would find them wherever they are and under whatever name makes most sense to them.

We've been through a lot in the last year as a family. And we've all had our own individual struggles. There have been times when i have felt that i only existed as God's afterthought, as a last-minute effort to correct an oversight. There have been moments when i doubted that God was paying any attention to me at all. There was one night where i was convinced that God did not exist at all.

I don't know why the wicked prosper and the good do not. I don't know why God doesn't tip the scales from time to time, why big miracles don't seem to happen any more, why babies die and my dad keeps getting fired and people starve to death while we throw away our uneaten French fries and hot fudge sundaes and cancer and AIDS exist and there is hatred and bigotry and ignorance and anger and fear and doubt.

I don't know what denomination, if any, i want to belong to. Sometimes, i don't know if i want to call myself a Christian anymore.

I am beset with doubt and instead of praying or talking to my pastor i am blogging quietly at my desk.

But this i do know:

Every time a major catastrophe touches me or my family, everything from dumping Casey to my mom's wedding to my brother's injury, there is a sale on Haagen-Dazs ice cream four days before.

Every time i need peace, strength, hope, and comfort, i am able to stock up on ice cream well beforehand. I like to think of it as God's way of wrapping His arms around me and saying, "Here. Have some ice cream. I love you."

I haven't yet put together a personal theology, nor have i found a more formal one with which to align myself. I may not have read the Bible in a while but i can confidently state that ice cream is not mentioned anywhere from Genesis to Revelations. Maybe in the Apocrypha somewhere, but i doubt it.

Here is what i do know: God is love. We are to love one another. Ice cream is good.

Red M&Ms Really Do Taste Better

I know, there's no flavoring associated with the colored coating. It's just food coloring and sugar. My brain is hard-wired to interpret colors as flavors, and red is my favorite color, so i think that they taste better when they really taste exactly the same. In a blind taste test, i wouldn't be able to tell one color from the next.

Except that the red ones are clearly superior.

Notice how all the other colors are supporting the red one.

I have carefully researched evidence to back up my claims: Mars (the company that makes them, not the planet or the god) makes more red ones than any other color. I know this because i have started buying bags of their peanut butter M&Ms to keep in my desk for when i need an afternoon sugar/protein boost. I bought a bag at the end of the summer, and as it was running out, i replaced it with two bags of the "fall colors" candies. These were, in their turn, replaced by Christmas ones, which were replaced by Valentine's ones.

Each of these bags contains a variety of colors, but they all have red. Furthermore, they all have a higher proportion of red to other colors.

How do i know?

So orderly and delicious.

Because i like the red ones best, and because i am slightly (extremely) OCD, i eat my M&Ms in reverse spectrum order. I also count out the exact same number each time for my serving. This means that when i eat the non-seasonal ones, i eat two of each color: brown, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Twelve total. The fall ones have four colors: brown, dark yellow, red, and a dark purply-red. This means that i eat three of each of these, and i eat them in this order: yellow, brown, purply-red, red. Christmas is red, dark green, light green, and white; again, three of each, and dark green-light green-white-red. And Valentines are three each of white, light pink, dark pink, and red.

The significance of this is that when the bag is new, i always eat the same number of each color. But some colors run out faster than others. I compensate by eating more of the other colors to ensure that i eat exactly twelve every time. I often compensate with the red ones, because they are my favorite. Yet red is always the last color to run out.

You could explain this in one of three ways:

• I am delusional.
• Mars knows that people like red best (Kool-Aid's default color is red, as is Hawaiian Punch, Twizzlers, and many popular fruits like apples and cherries), so they make more red ones than any others in order to subconsciously trigger consumer's brains to think that M&Ms are inexplicably slightly better than all other candies. This is also why the original M&Ms spokescandy was a red M&M.
• The Mars company is actually located on the Mars planet (the red planet) and owned by the Mars god (god of war).

I suppose it's possible that this is all coincidence. Maybe somewhere in the world, there is a person who never gets any red M&Ms, or at most, one or two per bag. Well, if that person is you, and you are reading this now, i am not going to share.