Yesterday I wondered if I’m prone to making rash decisions. I never thought so, but there was that time I bought the Stainless Steel Cookware I couldn’t afford from the door-to-door salesman when I was in my twenties and had one husband, one baby, one toddler, and one kindergartner in the house we rented for $75 a month and the wind was blowing outside, like it always did in Western Kansas. Even before that, when I said yes to what I only later realized was a hypothetical offer of marriage (What are you trying to say, I said, as he opened and closed his mouth like a guppy that had fallen out of its fishbowl, and he said I was wondering what you’d say if I asked you to marry me, and my head roared and the dashboard of his 1967 station wagon with electric windows that didn’t work and had to be pushed up just so with your fingertips swirled in front of me) could be classified as a rash decision, even though I’d been writing his name with a Mrs. in front of it for weeks.
What I was really thinking of, in the rash decision category, was the decision to become a Christian when I was 18, but that was actually a long time coming, my solid Judaeo-Christian heritage having piled on guilt my entire life, and I’d been looking for a way out for more than a year. My friend, Allison, talked to me about God when we ate lunch together at work every day. Even immediately after, I couldn’t remember a thing she said, but I drank in her friendship like rain on dry ground. I went to church on Sundays, looking for threads I could weave into some sort of forgiveness shroud. There were the billboards that said Jesus with an 800 number and I called it once but hung up when they tried to sell me the gospel, which I thought I already knew. This is all a long way to say that one week, after going to grown-up Sunday School and hearing Allison’s husband, Bob, teach about how God nailed our debt sheet to the cross, I was so relieved I couldn’t stop sobbing—it was a real gully washer and I had to be led out of the room—but after church when Bob and Allison and I went to lunch, I said no to their offer to pray with me to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior on the spot. I wanted to go home and think about it. I was still living with Mom and Dad, so took our Australian Shepherd, Missy, for a walk to the ravine near our house, where I didn’t usually go but seemed the right place for contemplation, and there, on the dirt trail, I talked it over with Missy and decided to become a Christian. Not rash but maybe rushed. I didn’t understand history or the different religions of the world; I hadn’t even been to college, I didn’t know how errant the supposedly inerrant bible was, I couldn’t see how Christianity confirmed and reaffirmed the patriarchy, how the promise of heaven encouraged me to delay effort and achievements during my “one wild and precious life”—for heaven’s sake, I didn’t even know Mary Oliver existed.
After I bought the Stainless Steel cookware, I berated myself for years. The set of pans we couldn’t afford mocked me every time I pulled one out to cook, but then, maybe forty years later, I realized that we’d had those pans forty years. They’d cost us $10 a year, if you ignore the time value of money. (For this illustration, ignoring the time value of money doesn’t measurably impact the story. Besides, that money wouldn’t have been collecting any interest or dividends, it would have been spent on the next thing on the list, probably something plastic that we’d no longer have anyway.) And while the 9-piece set gradually shed some of its members—we irrecoverably burned soup in the smallest saucepan, the handle for the frying pan fell off and was inadvisably replaced with a wooden handle, and after one of my husband’s rare cooking debacles the medium-sized saucepan was no longer in the cupboard—we still have the frying pan (yes with the wooden handle, which isn’t a problem on an induction stove) and the largest saucepan, including the steamer insert that I use all the time. And in the interim, we’d learned of the dangers of Teflon’s PFOAs and PTFEs. It struck me that my decision, which hadn’t after all ruined us financially, might just have made my whole family healthier.
You could say my decision to un-become a Christian, or to become an ex-vangelical, whichever you prefer, was fast, but no, I wouldn’t say it was rash. It was a long time coming. The thread that began the unraveling was political—that seems right—and one morning, in our house in Texas, after we’d raised our kids and Tim had led worship music for years and our boys played in the worship band and our daughter spent summers leading evangelical summer camps and all of the kids had their first trip overseas, separately, with their dad on mission trips to Hungary, and I’d worked on or led missions committees, and we’d gone to couples’ bible studies, and I’d gone to women’s bible studies, and Tim went to men’s bible studies, and we’d both gone to retreats, separately and together, and our kids served at Indian reservations, and we’d gone to church faithfully every Sunday, and Easter was my favorite holiday, and we’d mostly always tithed, and I’d often had daily quiet times and felt guilty if I didn’t, and I could find the book of Hebrews in the Bible without too much flipping, I walked up to my husband as he sat in the breakfast nook, kissed him, and said, “I’m a Democrat now,” having realized sometime in the night that my one-issue, right to life, religion-driven voting had given me George W. Bush as president and not much else, which seemed as politically bad as it could get at the time. Fortunately, while my husband didn’t denounce the Republican Party entirely, he agreed with me in principle, so we are still married. But once I pulled on that right-to-life thread, the whole thing unraveled. Why were some people blessed and others not? Why were religions so geographical? Why did every difficult question about the bible eventually get to “God is too big to understand” which seemed like an evasion rather than an answer. Why were women relegated to the kitchen, nursery, and children’s Sunday School? What if a woman didn’t feel like any of those were her spiritual gift? We went to church for a few years longer, but more and more it was like playing in a deflated bouncy house: without the buoyancy of faith, it hurt to jump.
