i feel like it's almost time

Things change. One of the fundamental truths of life, right? And the one to which I've had the hardest time adapting since I was a child. I always wanted things to stay the same forever. That one perfect summer day, scouting out with my best friend the abandoned property on the edge of town, the one with the ghostly English roses and the creepy chestnut tree, trying to breathe through a humidity that crawled under my tanktop and settled over my skin like melting Saran wrap and tried to smother me with the smell of roses. That one perfect moment practicing with the Youth Band at church, after fifteen minutes of frustration trying to remember a chord, when suddenly everything snapped into place and we found ourselves living in music. Years of watching the slide of sun and shadow through the fallow apple orchard across the street.

I've never liked change. I live in routine. When I was little I wanted to be one of the Lost Boys, or Peter Pan, and never grow up; I didn't want to leave home. I didn't want to give up my imaginary friends (who were never human -- no, I trucked with dragons and winged horses and talking panthers), I didn't want to yield to adulthood. I liked a hazy, soft-lens future, where everything was perfect and where reality stayed far away.

College changed my view of change. Some days I even liked change, or, at least, looked forward to what the change was accomplishing. There was a lot of change in those years, and I came on the other side of that monumental upheave the better for the wear and tear. Since then, change has been one of the only constants besides God, and it's on an uphill incline, even when there are dips and snags along the line graph.

I feel like the young twenties are a basic continuation of the late teens, which capitalize on the stretchings of adolescence, which mirror the rapid development of infants and toddlers, which can't even compare to the rapid development in the womb. Everyone grows so much in that first year of life, and then the early teen years hurl you forward into more physical growth while your emotional development is still sleeping in the backseat and it takes you until your late teens to begin to figure out what you've grown into. Then you start into the young twenties, sort of like Johnny Appleseed, with a tin pot of what you think you know on your head and a bag of potentialities slung over your shoulder, and you wander along throwing them wherever they might possibly grow, but sometimes it takes you a few years to retrace your steps and find out if anything's come of the scatterings.

But at some point you need to settle. At some point you realize that a handful of your scattered seeds have grown a little bit together in one spot, and that's the spot where you stay. You buy or rent a little apartment or a little house, and you watch the seedlings mature.

Have you read A Wind in the Door? In it L'Engle's tiny microcosmic fictional creatures called farandolae mature into fara which power a cell's mitochondria (okay, spell check, you don't recognize mitochondria. I will now believe nothing you underline in red). The moment of turning from a larval farandola into a mature fara is called "Deepening" -- and the process turns these flighty, mobile creatures into enormous (relatively speaking) things resembling trees, with roots and branches. If the farandolae don't Deepen, the cell dies. If the tiniest part of the human body doesn't put down roots, the human body sickens.

Like farandolae, we twentysomethings find ourselves, at some point before thirty (hopefully), looking for ways to Deepen. Spinning around in our own little carefree, disconnected ways can only last for a little while. Refusal to accept adulthood has consequences that reverberate much further than our own detriment; as L'Engle was a dedicated Anglican, her writing reflected a great deal on faith and the Body of Christ -- and, beautifully, not in overtly religious or churchy ways. Here, in the example of the farandolae, is a pretty simple statement: When young people choose not to grow up, the body begins to die. However small and insignificant we might like to think ourselves (isn't this why a lot of people our age don't vote? We don't think our one ballot makes any difference, but when thousands of people don't think their one ballot makes any difference, the difference is enormously noticeable), we're an integral part of the church, the community, the state, the nation, the world -- and L'Engle would go further to say the solar system, the galaxy, the universe, because to her everything -- everything -- is interconnected.

So yeah, I feel like it's almost time. Internally a lot of my attitudes and desires have been changing. I've been attending church on a weekly basis for the first time in seven years. I've joined the choir and barely mind the commitment, who used to hate anything that infringed on my time; and people are beginning to know who I am. I've started organizing my finances and planning ways to get out of debt. And I really, really want to figure out a way to help all the kids in the community who receive no attention from their parents and will probably wind up petty criminals and drug addicts without some kind of adult intervention outside the home. I think church is a good venue for this.

These aren't astronomical changes, to the naked eye. But I've been told by several people who know me well that these past few months I've been sounding better than I have in years. And I can take no credit for it. None. It's just...time. It's time to make the most of time. And I know we never stop growing, that life never stops being that process toward perfection that we'll never quite achieve but still must strive for; but there's something to be said for wandering around in the woods aimlessly and then coming to a path. Or, to fit better into my earlier comparisons, wandering in the woods aimlessly and then coming to a clearing with a cabin with your name on the mailbox. There's still work to be done, and there always will be, but you've found your place. Even if it's temporary, you've found your place. I mean, after all, some of us are pioneers.

And lingering ahead, always just out of view, is that tantalizing promise of joy and rest, and the knowledge that eventually we'll get there.

When we arrive, sons and daughters
We'll make our homes on the water
We'll build our walls of aluminum
We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon
Now

These currents pull us 'cross the border
Steady your boats, arms to shoulder
Till tidal pull, or Holy God's
Making this calm harbor now
Home

Take up your arms, sons and daughters
We will arise from the bunkers
By land, by sea, by dirigible
We'll leave our tracks untraceable
Now

When we arrive, sons and daughters
We'll make our homes on the water
We'll build our walls of aluminum
We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon
Now

Hear all the bombs fade away
Here all the bombs fade away
Hear all the bombs fade away
Here all the bombs fade away

~The Decemberists

*Note: I pulled these lyrics by ear, since I listened to this fabulous song on repeat many times over. There are a couple of lines on which the lyrics websites don't agree, so I felt free to put in what I thought they were.