Olivia Flynn

       It’s October and we’re bored. I’m at my friend’s house, and she suggests a game. That’s how I find myself blindfolded on a stool in the kitchen while she rummages through the fridge for something to feed me. 
There’s sinister potential here—wilted lettuce and Worcestershire sauce, mustard, milk, something expired. I hope my friend is kinder than that. I finally hear her pull something out, and a moment later she guides a spoon into my mouth and I suck on what I’m sure is battery acid. I choke it down, lips puckered. “What is that?” My friend sounds like she doesn’t believe me. “You know what it is.” “No, I don’t.”
 “Just guess!”
       I throw out a few frustrated guesses, enough that it finally seems to hit her that I really don’t know what she fed me. “How,” she exclaims, “can you not know it’s sweet tea?” 
       There’s a jolt in my stomach. A little flustered, I stammer, “I’ve never had it.”
       My friend exclaims, “What?” at the same time that her mom’s voice barks from the other room: “She’s not supposed to drink that!”  
       My friend’s family knows about my rules. They know I don’t play soccer on Sundays. They know I wear one-piece swimsuits. They know my family doesn’t drink alcohol, coffee, or—earth shatteringly—sweet tea.  
       This isn’t my first time accidentally ingesting something sinful. When I was ten, I downed a good portion of a margarita at a yard sale, thinking it was poorly-made lemonade. Incidents like this are annoying, but not anything I lose sleep over. I doubt God sends us to Hell for unintentional consumption.  
       So I assure my friend that no, I will not melt in some kind of purgatory, and no, I won’t be kicked out of my religion. Then I wash down the bitter sweet tea with a glass of water, and that is that. 
Now, about ten years later, I return to that incident occasionally because memory has given it different colors. “How can you not know it’s sweet tea?”  
       My friend was appropriately shocked. We were growing up in northwest Georgia: Dixie, the Bible Belt, the Deep South, the Southland, the Empire State of the South. Southerners wash down their fried okra, collard greens, and cobbler with ice-cold Lipton, Gold Peak, and Pure Leaf. To admit I’d never had sweet tea was like admitting I’d never had a burger or a french fry or a slice of pizza.  
       Frankly, though, I liked the peculiarity the Word of Wisdom gave me, because otherwise, I wasn’t too exciting. White Christian American female, brown hair, blue eyes, nuclear family. My religion gave me something like distinction. The Word of Wisdom made me feel unique, exotic. Like my Hindu teammate, like my Muslim classmates, I had a health code, a standard. Turning down glasses of sweet tea felt holy.
       Despite never drinking it—except for that one time, on accident—sweet tea is so quintessentially Southern that it’s hard not to think about it as I consider my Southern identity, which I’ve done a lot over the last couple years.  
       I haven’t lived in Georgia for almost six years. Right before my junior year of high school, my family relocated to Idaho for an employment opportunity. Shortly after, I moved to Utah for college, then lived in Kansas and Missouri as a missionary. Now I’m back in Utah. Five states in six years. I have a Utah address and an Idaho license plate and a Georgia birth certificate and a secret loyalty to the Kansas City Chiefs.  
       Moving is normal, and it’s important to experience new things, but I don’t like feeling like a patchwork quilt. I want to be completely from somewhere, unicultural, and with a clear identity. For a while, I could get away with simply telling people that I’m from Georgia, the land and culture I identify with the most, but now, my relevant life experiences are scattered across the country, making it harder to manage a personal conversation without revealing all the different fabrics of myself.  
       I find it uncomfortable, because origin is an important part of how I experience my identity. Origin gives me roots, confidence, culture. Five states in six years makes me feel the way James describes those who ask for wisdom without any faith: “like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed” (James 1.6). 
       I especially feel this as a student. Because my parents are only a few hours away, I drive up north to visit them a few times a year, usually on long weekends and holidays. A little over a year ago, after arriving back at my apartment from one such visit, my roommate at the time asked me how the trip was. I told her it was good.  
       “Was the airport busy?” she asked.  
       My heart sank. Why did she have to ask? Now this conversation was headed somewhere I didn’t want it to go. “I drove,” I said.
       Cue the visible confusion. “You drove to Georgia!?”  “My parents actually live in Idaho now,” I said. I suddenly felt naked, trapped. “We moved there a little before I came to college.”  
       The confusion wasn’t my roommate’s fault. I’d told her the same thing I tell everyone when they ask—that I’m from Georgia. Because I am. But then, standing there, watching her think this over, I felt as if I’d been caught in a lie.  My roommate said, “So you’re actually from Idaho.” 
       Where are you from?—I loathe this question. I insist to people—and myself—that I am from Georgia. I want to be Southern. But often, things go the way they did with my roommate. It doesn’t help my case that I don’t have a Southern accent, which I’m incredibly sensitive about. If people can’t hear my identity, then I have to prove it some other way. Out loud, I romanticize rednecks and rifles, fried catfish and Coke, cicadas and SEC playoffs—things that I genuinely like, but things that have become, over the years, little more than showpieces I display to prove a point.  
       I defended myself to my roommate, reminding her that I was born in Georgia, that I’d spent most of my life in Georgia. “I lived in Missouri for my mission the same amount of time I lived in Idaho with my parents,” I added, trying not to sound as flustered as I felt, “but I don’t say I’m from Missouri.”  
       But every time I defend myself like that, and for long hours after, there’s a whisper that nags at me: Are you really from Georgia? Are you really Southern? I don’t live there anymore. I haven’t been in contact with my friends there in years. And, in many ways, even while I lived there, I was an outsider to Southern Bible Belt culture. I didn’t hunt or have a pastor or wear Bible verses on my t-shirts.  
       And I didn’t drink sweet tea.
       I never felt very exciting growing up. A white Christian American female from Georgia was nothing compared to the people I read about in books, who were Chosen Ones or starcrossed lovers or—best of all—orphans. Oh, how six-year-old me dreamed of the thrill of being orphaned.  
       I remember being in first grade and watching an episode about adoption from a children’s show. A girl in the episode explained to her friends that she was adopted from China, then taught them how to celebrate the Chinese New Year. That seemed to me to be about the most glamorous thing in the world, even better than being orphaned.  
       We sat at round tables in first grade, with centerpiece boxes of crayons and safety scissors. A perfect stage. When the episode was over, I turned to the girl sitting next to me and announced, “I’m adopted.”  
       That got everyone at the table’s attention. “Really?” the girl asked. 
       “From Mexico,” I said. I think I chose Mexico because I was wearing a long red pleated skirt, which seemed Mexican to me. 
       Of course, I was not adopted from Mexico, which my teacher later confirmed with my mom, much to my embarrassment. Being discovered didn’t discourage my dreaming, though. Most of my friends’ parents were born in the same town we lived in and had attended the same elementary school we did, so I bragged about how my mom was from Idaho to make her, and myself, seem foreign. I got a DNA test for my fifteenth birthday and scoured my ancestry for any indication of thrilling international heritage. Disappointingly, I learned that all my ancestry is English and German. About as white and boring as it gets.  
       And then I moved out west, and suddenly I had the key: I was from Georgia, the mysterious world of the South where it’s as hot as fire and brimstone and where pastors scream out from pulpits and wave Bibles and where people talk long and fine and slow and where we, supposedly, grow a lot of peaches. 
       I became a lot more exciting to myself. Except for the constant nagging question: What if I’m not who I say I am?
       Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Having been inside the temple, I’ve heard those questions answered for myself. For me, the answers are best described in a moment, a night from my mission. My companion and I were attending the temple in Kansas City with our ward, and more importantly, with a friend we taught who was receiving her endowment.
       When I walked into the celestial room, our friend was waiting for me, dressed in glowing white, face red and sticky with tears. She threw her arms around me and held me for a long moment. “How do you feel?” 
       I asked her in Spanish. It took her another long moment to reply. “Hermosa,” she said finally. Beautiful.  
       When I’m in the temple, I think about that embrace often, and that word. Hermosa. Beautiful. I never feel quite as beautiful anywhere else as I do in the temple. And yet, when I step outside, I once again feel the pull of home—not of the heavenly home that I taste inside the temple, but of Georgia, of its heavy thunderstorm air carding through lush sweetgum trees, of its thick red clay soil that tints the soles of my shoes. I think of Memorial Days at the muddy lake, of the heat. And of cool sweet tea.  
       In order to enter the temple, in order to learn who I am, where I came from, and why I’m here, I have to obey the Word of Wisdom. It’s ironic that the closer I get to understanding my divine identity, the further I am pulled from my earthly identity.  
       No, not ironic—that’s the wrong word. Bittersweet would be better, bitter sweet tea. Does it make me a bad person that, unlike the Ammonites, I am reluctant to lay down my weapons of war? That unlike Nephi and Zoram, I hesitate to leave everything behind and follow the prophet into the wilderness? That unlike Alma, I ache for the freedom and comforts of King Noah’s court?
       I shouldn’t complain. I know that I am beyond blessed— blessed to enter the temple, blessed to know this gospel. Which is why I remind myself—I don’t want to drink sweet tea. At all. 
       King Benjamin teaches us that we should overcome the natural man. This is straightforward to me, until I remember how comfortable the natural man is. The natural man gets to drink ice cold sweet tea with her friends on boring October days in Georgia. If she doesn’t think about it too hard, the natural man knows who she is, where she is from, and what she wants while she’s here.  
       Paola, Kansas, was a golden-lit ghost town, perfect if you like long dirt roads through dusty prairie grass and believe in spirits, but grim if your goal is to meet living people. It was a muggy, mosquito-muddled May, and my companion and I were stretched out in the living room, her on the sofa, me on the velvet loveseat, the AC blasting, the sour scent of a lit joint wafting through the vents from the floor below.  
       Between my companion and me was President Russell M. Nelson’s voice, floating out from the bottom of my phone. “First and foremost,” he said, “you are a child of God. Second, as a member of the Church, you are a child of the covenant. And third, you are a disciple of Jesus Christ.”  
       My companion and I both scribbled that down in our journals. “That’s good,” my companion said.  
       I agreed, because as a missionary, I thought a lot less about where I was from. My biggest concerns were who we were teaching, when our next lesson was, where our next meal was coming from, and who my next companion would be. Endlessly absorbed in doctrine, it was a lot easier to take in President Nelson’s teachings on who I am. Now, though, I reread his devotional and I wonder, first and foremost? Nothing else before?
       I’ve realized that the discomfort of place comes from pride —pride in who I’ve always considered myself to be. Is it really more important to me to be from Georgia than to be God’s daughter? Am I more concerned with the South than I am with the kingdom of God?  
       Maybe my longing for an identity is actually a lesson in humility—a season spent in God’s refining fire, a truth as difficult as sweet tea to swallow. 
       I am often homesick. Long Utah winters make me crave Georgia’s long summer, and dry Utah summers make me miss sticky Southern air and churning July storms. I miss okra and fried green tomatoes, cashiers who smile and call you baby. I miss yes ma’am and no ma’am and buggies and pocketbooks and SEC football on warm Saturdays.  
       And I don’t miss sweet tea because I don’t want to drink it, and because my single taste of it was a bitter one. But I miss living in a world where I was Southern and didn’t have to prove it, where my divine identity felt more like distinction and less like another square in my patchwork quilt of origin. But maybe who I am, really, is less who I long to be, and more what God created me to be.    
       Am I humble enough to learn who that is?  
       And will whoever that is be enough for me?