Babylonian Theory of Evolution

This one is about my theory of evolution.

(expletives have not been redacted...smooch!)

I have no idea when it happened, but I can tell you the moment I realized it. I was standing in the toilet aisle of a big box home improvement store, trying really hard to decide whether or not to buy the American Standard model, with the 5 year warranty, antibacterial glaze, and the ability to flush a record 154 sheets of toilet paper at one time, or the Kholer Well-Worth model, which, while not as flashy as the American Standard, brought with it the esteem of the Kohler name, and looked like it would match my bathtub and sink fairly well. I was standing in the aisle, kind of biting my lip, shifting from foot to foot, trying like hell to pick out a toilet, and I was hit with the freight train of a thought that went something like, "holy crap, THIS is what it feels like to be a grown-up."

Keep in mind that the trip to the big box home improvement store was just the last portion of a string of events over a 36-hour time frame that made my head spin. On Friday of this particular weekend, I woke up ready to do some business on my day off, and so I went to the bank, and rolled over my 401k into an IRA. I went to see Mom and Grammy for lunch, since I had the day off, and I got my teeth cleaned. Later that day, I made a mortgage payment. It was not a Chico’s kind of day—I still haven’t had one of those, yet, but it was pretty freaking grown up.

That night, I went out with my friend Jax, and had 1.5 adult drinks—1.5…meaning I left half a drink still in my glass. Can you say “self-control”? Granted, we were at Pat O’Brien’s, by the Alamo, and they have HUGE glasses, but seriously...1.5 drinks. Then we went to some townie bar on the north side of town, to see some people Jax went to high school with, which we shut down, and where I didn’t actually drink anything but water. I was home and in bed by 2:30 am...on a Friday night, like a reasonable single girl in her late twenties. (I knew this was how they did things, because I had been watching all the right t.v. shows.) No big deal, right? I was in bed at a reasonable Friday night bed time. I had hydrated after drinking, and had been super adult and productive all day, and can I just say that the dentist told me I had no cavities? I should have been totally fine, the next morning.

Wrong. I woke up Saturday morning with a hangover that was secretly really A HANGOVER—light sensitive headache, scratchy eyes, general instability in the gastrointestinal region, and I was pretty sure my cat had forgotten to use his box, and used my mouth, instead. If my friend Ryan had called me that morning, and asked me to tell him what the reading was on my Wrath of God Index, I probably would have told him it was somewhere in the 22.5-25.0 range, on a10 point scale. I wanted to die, just so I could not feel hung-over, anymore. I cursed the name of Pat O’Brien, and wished terrible things to happen to whoever invented and perpetuated the Hurricane as a cocktail to be served in HUGE FUCKING PORTIONS. I wanted a shower and a big cup of coffee. I wanted to feel like a grown-up, again. After all, I had spent the whole last day acting like one. And then I realized how many grown-ups DO wake up all hung-over and ill-feeling, and that is a normal day for them. I was immediately sad and weepy about this, which was also a symptom of the hangover.

This hangover was vengeful—granted I have a somewhat limited experience with them...no, seriously. There was no cause for the violence of it. None at all. And it was during that limnal moment between being hung-over and finally feeling slightly ok, while I was standing in the toilet aisle at home depot that I realized that there was no going back. Not ever.

There had been a Change. And even if I sold my house, gave away my cat, killed off my plants, and ran off to some do a silent retreat and contemplated to whom I would give all my worldly possessions, the real change, the change that was in my head and my heart was there to stay.

I don’t think it’s any big coincidence that Jesus didn’t start His ministry until He was thirty. For me, I didn’t start putting all the pieces of who I was together until right around my thirtieth birthday, give or take a few months on either side. Here’s why I think this is true.

And let me say here, much of this is VERY general. I was parented very well,and very intentionally. I was not a perfect kid. We did not have a perfect family, but we had a good life together, and still do...but still, here's the other hand...

For a huge portion of my life, I was lead to believe that I was preparing myself for The Future, rather than living a fully integrated life and being alive. I went to public school for thirteen years (counting kindergarten), and then went to college for that all-important Bachelor’s Degree. During my growing up years, I also attended Sunday School, summer camp, vacation Bible school, mission trips, seminars on why nice girls don’t have sex until they are married, weekend workshops for super smart kids who would all end up in law school or MBA programs, and all the other shit people my parents’ age thought they needed to do for their kids to grow up and have a chance at a vibrant and vital life. I knew I was alive, but I don’t think I understood anything about what that really meant. I mean, I had homework that was due, tomorrow…and that dude in my health class made me feel all lit up on the inside…and sometimes, I didn’t know why I felt all alone in the middle of a room full of people, and thought that must mean there was SOMETHING WRONG WITH ME. And then, there was God, all around me, but I had no idea how to get to the middle of where or what God was.

You know what all I learned? Not too fucking much, but some of it had value. For instance, I learned that it’s better to sit at the table with the quiet kids, because the loud kids will eventually start throwing dinner rolls, and then everyone at that table gets into trouble. I learned that if I sat in the back, left-corner of the room, and took notes, I could be almost invisible, and no teachers would habitually call on me, and I wouldn’t be made fun of all the time for being smart. I learned to plan four or five moves ahead, so I could become invisible, if I needed or wanted to.

I think the worst thing I learned was that Life is Something that Starts Happening on the day you have all your shit together, but not until. I learned that Life was Something you prepared for, and executed, like a dive or a driving test. At no point do I remember anyone really telling me, in no uncertain terms, with their own actions and words that Life was Something that was Happening NOW. The only model I had for that kind of edginess was Jesus. When I found myself in Babylon, and realized that, I was thankful for Jesus and mad as hell at pretty much the whole rest of everyone that I knew. Nobody told me that this final was going to be cumulative. This shit was not in the syllabus. This was not fucking fun. At all. And it was going to be like this until I died. And of course, that kind of made me want to go stick my head in the oven, and do some deep breathing.

In my family, because my father was chronically ill from the time I was 10 until he died when I was 18, we lived from doctor’s visit to doctor’s visit, and how things were going at home was directly tied to his health, most of the time. I knew that things were good because someone told me they were. I knew that things were bad because people stopped talking, and their faces got hard, and a blanket of disease would settle over the house. I didn’t know that everyone, everywhere, in every family has something like this. I didn’t learn that, certainly at least wasn’t able to process that until I got to Babylon, and started hearing pieces of what I thought was a story that only belonged to me come tumbling out of other people’s mouths.

Standing in the big box store that day, when I was 28 years old, buying my first-ever toilet to go in my first-ever house, I started to realize what would crystallize inside of me over the next three years…I was a grown up, not because of all the things that I was doing, because I’d been doing grown up things, had had to do them, since I was 17. No one needed to tell me this, and I didn’t need to go down to the license bureau and have a new i.d. made. As I was looking at the toilets, thinking about how spending more than $150 at any one time felt like a major purchase, and how I wished I had paid more attention to toilet installation on mission trips so I wouldn’t have to pay for someone to come install mine for me, I understood that picking up the mantle of who I was, of who I believed God made me to be was about just that…ME picking up the mantle, not having it handed to me when the time was just right by my fairy godparents or an angel or someone else who really loved me and thought that I was ready. I knew I was ready, or at least as ready as I was going to be, and then…shock of all shocks, I realized, like a little kid learning to ride a bike, who realizes she is RIDING HER BIKE ALL BY HERSELF BECAUSE DADDY LET GO!! YAY!! And HOLY SHIT!!, that I had been doing this for a long time, ready or not.

Predictably, I fell right of the bike, at that most excellent and good moment, and scraped myself up pretty good. Babylon giveth, and Babylon sure the hell taketh away. But I knew, undeniably that I had crossed the Rubicon, at some point, and I was here, actively engaged in my life, and aware of that in a strange and different way than I had understood that, before. I remember standing there, having this thought blaze through my bewildered consumer responses, “So this is what being a grown-up feels like…” It felt like realizing I’d been wearing some strange new piece of clothing for months, and had just figured out that the thing I had tied around my waist was actually supposed to be wound around my head.

It would take me the better part of three years to figure out how to get the thing moved around, and situated correctly. And there are still days when I’m not sure how the fuck I’m supposed to wear it, or even if I should put it on before I leave the house. On days like that, I pray a lot. And sometimes, I stay home with the cat, and we watch “The Last Waltz” with the second commentary on (because Levon Helm is amazing and his voice reminds me of the collected wisdom of parts of my Southern childhood), and as soon as I hear Neil Young start the harmonica solo just before beginning “Helpless”, I know that tomorrow will be a better day. Learning to live in Babylon, to be a grown-up here, to try and walk beside Jesus…it’s a day by day reconciliation of the little girl in the drive way and the grown woman in the toilet aisle. It’s evolution on the most basic spiritual level, and just like my vestigial tail took hundreds of thousands of years to lose, learning how to walk upright into the Kingdom will take a long, long time.