Content advisory: This post includes an account of a multiple murder and a description of masturbation.
“This one’s my favorite.” Henry handed me the deck and told me to grab a card. I cut it and slid a spade from the top into my palm. We'd been exchanging card tricks for some time, even as everyone else had started up the hill with plastic chairs. Henry was quite the showman. He kept a professional demeanor throughout every trick, even when he made mistakes. He indeed flubbed this particular trick, and I knew how he had done it before he’d even finished, but I was still impressed by his concluding dramatic reveal. Now it was my turn. I couldn’t match his confidence or his controlled delivery in his presence, so I opted for the oldest fib in the book.
“I haven't done this in a while.” I was a liar, but this is a lie everybody tells. In reality, I had been avidly practicing card magic right before I'd gone to camp. To avoid the pretension of assuming a character, I opted to show him how my tricks work, like a light tutorial, rather than actually performing. I was much more interested in watching Henry’s reactions. I pulled out the jokers for a card-counting trick.
When I first joined the Sioux, I didn't think any of our trips would lead to being comfortably seated at a picnic table exchanging card tricks with a buddy for hours, but this was not the first time the tribe had subverted my expectations. The boys camp was divided into several age groups, each of which took its name and theme from an American Indian tribe. I'd progressed through a number of these attending camp summer after summer. This was my seventh year. Over all that time, I’d fallen in love with the place. It had a big lake in the middle furnished with a water slide, diving boards, and a huge, inflated blob off of which we would catapult one another. I couldn't think of a better place for a boy to spend two weeks. It was equal parts fun and spiritual, and the strong Christian messages and encouragement always left me feeling closer to God by the end.
After the summer two years prior, I had to choose how I would progress. I could remain in the Iroquois tribe and stay at camp doing all the things I’d enjoyed in the past, or I could join the Sioux, who would take off for most of the session, hiking all around the Southeast. I chose Sioux in a heartbeat.
Henry gently applauded my slight-of-hand and took back the deck. We were losing light. He spread the cards. I leaned in to make a selection when a crash came from the top of the hill followed quickly by the uproarious laughter of the fifteen or so guys who’d gone up ten or twenty minutes earlier. David Hedley came sprinting down, nodded at us, and grabbed two more frail plastic chairs from the patio. “We’ve already broken two of these just by sitting on them,” he explained. I’d met David the previous year. Then, he was unremarkable, though fairly nice as far as I could remember. He’d come back unrecognizable, with earrings and long hair. He’d put on some weight. His manner of speaking was different—calm and self-assured. He ran back up the slope with seat backs under his arms shouting, “I got you covered!”
Len and Isaac were the only other guys still with Henry and me at the base, reclining in their hammocks. Len looked up at the fire that the others were constructing. “Isaac and me are gonna go up.” I think that was an invitation. I could hear them laughing up there. The Sioux had inevitably grown close in the last week and a half, and we entertained ourselves with long, freely roaming conversations. I knew how those went. I was perfectly content to stay down with Henry for now. Henry looked back at me with only one of his eyes.
I'd met him the previous summer, my first Sioux year. I was curious about him. He was a little odd. He had wild, unkempt dirty-blond hair and a truly unusual selective lazy eye, which would drift to the side but could spring back into its place if Henry so commanded it. He had explained that he'd been hit on the head as a kid. That could explain multiple things. He would play the game “Five Finger Fillet” in which one spreads his fingers on a table and strikes between them with a knife. His stabbing was prestissimo, and he would slide his hand around the table, all to the grave consternation of us onlookers. He spoke with conviction on any topic no matter how trivial, and he seemed to navigate the world with a great degree of care. He was opinionated, but thoughtful and open-minded—a really pleasant guy to spend time with overall. I got to know him fairly well that first year. The trips were tough, and we two hiked long days and talked together, though not much more than we did with other guys.
This year, the two trips had been easy. First, we’d scaled Mount Michael. Then we’d embarked on a short kayaking trip, which was intense, but brief. Now we were spending a night outside the home of a friend of the camp. We called him Doc. We had access to refreshments and flush toilets, so in our view we really living it up. It wasn’t the sort of challenge that I had wanted from a Sioux experience, but I got that the first year. A more relaxed approach was welcome. I'd made such good friends there and had such little time to just be with them.
Our afternoon there so far had been pleasant. We’d set up camp in the large yard. Most of the others had to improvise because they had hammocks, which were light, but there was no abundance of trees on which to hang them. They frantically pinned themselves up to the columns of the raised porch. I’d opted to carry a tent because I’d always preferred a sleeping bag, so I was able to sit back, laugh, and watch them scurry. When everything was set, Doc let us shoot skeet in his backyard. Considering that I’d never fired a shotgun before, I was pretty good at it. At that time, I was hanging out with Len, a huge dude and an actual Sioux Indian, who was new to this session of the summer. He was likeable and funny, if a bit dim. He and I joked around, and Isaac passively listened in and laughed hysterically.
Isaac was a scrawny, autistic, supremely white guy. I'd known him the previous year. He immediately appeared to be out-of-place when I first met him. When I laid eyes on the guy, I was genuinely concerned about how well he'd hold up to the hiking. My concern doubled when I discovered that he had brought a heavy, two-person tent in no way designed to be carried on someone’s back for a long hike. When we’d hit the trail, it was immediately obvious to me that he shouldn't be there. We were only an hour in, and he was breaking down. He was crying. He had no clue how difficult this would be. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I judged his parents for letting him join the tribe. It seemed to be such a patently bad idea. He stopped often and slowed the group down, crying, complaining, and sweating buckets. I started to wonder if we would have to turn back, but several breakdowns later, he along with the rest of us eventually made it to the campsite—a soft, brown clearing surrounded by tall, thick trees that hid the sun.
“Alright, everybody set up camp!” said Sean, our group leader. The others got out their hammocks and tarps and found trees that would hold their weight. I inflated my pad, and laid my sleeping bag on top of it, carefree. Sean seemed worried. “Jacob, do you have, like, a tent?”
“Nope!”
“Well, how do you expect this to work?”
“I'm going to sleep under the stars… like the other campouts.”
“You know it's supposed to rain this whole trip, right? We discussed this more than once.”
I was such an idiot. I never listened to a damn thing anyone said to me, and now it was time to panic. Apparently, I’d looked at the wrong packing list, and never considered that there was a major omission. To this day, I have no idea how I managed to survive sixteen years being this stupid. I was out in the woods without shelter, and it was going to pour. My first idea was to sleep under one of the hammocks and make use of its overhead rain tarp.
“So you want to sleep in a mud puddle,” Sean retorted.
God damn it. At this point, my plan was to pray to God to cancel the rain. Not my best plan, but it was all I had to go on for the time being. But then I remembered the ridiculous two-person tent that Isaac was carrying. It had escaped my mind because he had yet to set it up. He was sitting on the dirt, still recovering from his long hike. We hadn’t interacted much, but I approached him. I asked him if he would mind sharing his tent with me. He was very resistant. I felt awful, because I knew he was having a tough trip, and I was making it worse due to my failure to prepare. I tried to sweeten the deal. By the conclusion of our negotiation, I had to carry his tent and most of his food, but at least I had a place to sleep. He now had a lighter bag than anyone’s. Mine was now so heavy, I struggled to lift it off the ground. But it rained hard that night.
I’m glad that it worked out that way because our hikes were much more interesting when Isaac was happy. It still wasn’t easy for him, but things were never nearly as bad as that first day. We discovered that he possessed the unmatched ability to memorize entire episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants, and he would recite them in proper time with fantastic impressions and sound effects as we hiked. I still feel guilty for imposing on him, but I think the trip worked out better for everyone due to my stupid mistake. This year, I had brought a much lighter one-person tent. He had a hammock.
Henry winked and pulled my card out of his wallet—a twist I had not anticipated. It took me a good forty seconds to figure out how he did it, so I was suitably impressed, and I complimented his dexterity. It was now evening. Tobias came down the hill to use the restroom. As he walked by, he warned us, “If and when you join us, everyone’s having a really serious talk. Spillin’ their hearts and shit, so be respectful going up there. But you really should go up. You can play cards later.” I hadn’t even noticed that they had gone quiet.
So after a moment of deliberation, we boxed up the cards, chose the two least broken chairs from the side of the house, and headed up the hill toward the fire just in time to see the tail end of a spectacular sunset which I would later discover my disposable camera had failed to capture. We attempted to enter the circle as quietly as possible. I set my chair next to Henry’s. I sat in it and immediately fell through. Some of my tribemates laughed, but their chortles were sufficiently subdued to indicate to me that the tenor of the conversation really had changed. Tobias quietly invited me to the other side of the fire where he had an extra chair left by one of the guys now sitting on the ground closer to the warmth of the fire. The counselors were in the house with Doc and his wife. They left us alone to talk as peers.
David Hedley continued his orchestration of the conversation in a quiet and deadly serious voice. “Who of you here is not a virgin?” He promptly thrust his hand into the air. One or two others sheepishly followed. The true number may have been higher, but we weren’t quite sure what he was getting at. My hand was honest in its rest.
“Really. Just a few. Wow. That’s good. Like, the high-school culture of today might tell you that virginity is something bad, but it’s really just the opposite. When I raise my hand, I’m not trying to brag. It’s not something I’m proud of.” I think David had said something about wanting to be a youth pastor. From the youth pastors I’ve known, he’d fit right in. “Well, we’re all big boys here,” he continued, “so I’m going to talk a little bit about it.” I think he’d overestimated the profundity of his utterances, but we were going to hear about his sex life regardless. The conversation had gotten “real” enough that nobody groaned, at least not audibly.
He told us about his now ex-girlfriend, their relationship, and how it led to him having regular sex. “Sex feels good. Sex feels great. But I wish I saved it for marriage. That’s what God wants. God gave us these rules because he knows what’s best for us. Because when I had sex, it was just about feeling good. It wasn’t about commitment or anything sacred. But most importantly, it goes against what God tells us to do.
“Really, sex outside of marriage is gross. Like, if you think about it, when you have sex with someone, you’re really also having sex with all the dudes she’s ever had sex with. And then you’re really having sex with all the girls they’ve had sex with. That can be a ton of people outside of God’s perfect standard of true, committed monogamy. And the germs and juices and shit all stay around. Like all the stuff that comes with sex is just getting thrown around. It’s gross. And now, if you marry and have sex with my ex-girlfriend, it’s kind of like you’re having sex with me. Which is gay.”
Unfortunately, this was the sort of thing which often passed for “deep” conversation among very Christian teens, at least in my experience. I think it’s the only way some of these guys knew how to talk about sex. I had finally matured enough to realize that this kind of talk never accomplished anything other than making some kids feel pious and wise, as they righteously slashed through all the icky things in the world around them, and making others feel secretly ashamed for their inabilities to meet an impossible and suffocating standard. Part of this realization was tied to the fact that I had finally accepted the label of “atheist,” though I had been one for much longer. I kept this fact close to the chest. That’s probably part of the reason I felt a bit isolated from my hiking peers. Though I made some strong friendships, there was a certain fraternal camaraderie within the group that I felt separated from.
“So, no pressure, but do any of you guys who raised your hand want to talk about their experience with premarital sex?” There was a decided silence. No one other than David had spoken since I’d joined the circle. “Okay. That’s fine. No one has to share anything they don’t want to,” he continued, “While we’re on the subject though, I want to talk about something, a sin, that I think that all of us can relate to as guys. I think it’s safe to say that all of us masturbate to some degree.”
“I don’t,” said Isaac in a hushed voice.
That was another issue with these kinds of conversations among the “youth group” youth. Once they entered the sexual realm, there was no return. As teenage boys, we were all thinking about sex and sexuality, but the “Christian spin” usually turned this into an extended session of shame and self-condemnation for being a sexual entity in any capacity. These groups were often much more concerned about what they were allowed to do with their penises than philosophy or morality or theology or any of the ways in which religion actually adds value to people’s lives. At this point I’d finally identified why this perversion of confession made me sick to my stomach.
Greg, a truly kind, good guy whom I had gotten to know in the previous year, had spoken on this matter before in a small group with me and another guy. He reiterated the same shame he’d felt the year before. Nothing had changed. He seemed to have a genuine porn addiction, claiming to go at it three sessions daily at his worst—far more than I ever had. He said that it was the hardest sin for him to escape. He’d failed himself over and over again. He’d failed God.
The word “sin” had been thrown around twice at this point. I wasn’t the only one who picked up on this. Jared asked, “Is masturbation really a sin, though? You’re just touching your own body. Like, maybe it isn’t super healthy to do it constantly, like Henry was saying, for sure, and I definitely do it too much, but I don’t know if it’s inherently sinful. You could make a good argument for watching porn being a sin because that’s clearly lust for someone who you don’t have a right to, but I don’t know if masturbation itself is sinful.” Jared usually joked around. This was the most seriously I’d ever heard him talk.
“Well, maybe not the act itself, like physically, but to masturbate you pretty much have to lust, which is a sin. Unless you’re masturbating to the thought of your wife, I guess, but none of us are in that situation,” said David.
“But, pretending that I don’t use porn, which I do, but pretending I don’t, and pretending I only masturbate to thinking about girls who don’t exist, like an imaginary lifeguard or something, I’m not lusting after someone in particular, so I’m not sure that would be a sin just by the text of the Bible itself.”
“That’s a lot of pretending,” said David.
“Also, Jared, we infer lots of stuff from the Bible. The fact that it isn’t like written explicitly in the text doesn’t mean we can’t know something is wrong if it goes against the Bible’s principles. Not that I don’t masturbate or anything because I totally do, but I still think it’s probably not allowed. Like, I don’t think fapping is part of God’s plan for sex,” Wright added. “I don’t know, though.”
“The idea is… the idea is that our bodies aren’t really ours. Like, God made them, so even though they’re our bodies—well they’re not our bodies—but even though these are the bodies that we’re in, we can’t just do anything to them that we want because they exist for God’s purposes, not ours, you know? Like the whole ‘your body is a temple’ thing. You shouldn’t fap in a temple, I guess. You don’t have the right to do that to your body. Also, I agree with David that it’s lust,” said Tobias.
This conversation went on for a while.
I had a strained relationship with masturbation. I remember the first time. I’d stumbled across an article on nudism, and it fascinated me. There weren’t any photos or graphic descriptions. There was no sex. But the idea of being naked was exciting and new. Into the night, I scrolled through the comments section of the article until I hit the end. I crawled from the floor where I left my iPad charging and rolled onto my bed. Under the sheets, I couldn’t help but squirm. And think. I didn’t imagine other people. I didn’t imagine much at all. It was just about feeling. The sleep shorts I’d long since overgrown slid off, and I lay on my stomach and rubbed gently against the mattress until I was done. Dry. And to me, inexplicable.
I of course later discovered that this was indeed masturbation, though very much unlike the kind of masturbation I had heard of in whispered lunch-table conversations at my Christian middle school. And on top of that, my light imaginings were sexless and serene. I didn’t know why things were different for me. I couldn’t get off in the normal way when I put my hands to the task. If masturbation were a sin, I wished that I could sin normally, in the normal way, so I wasn’t so isolated from the group experiences all around me. And by the time I realized that I was masturbating, I had to deal with something else—the boys who lived in my imaginings. Everything was wrong. But nothing felt wrong. I needed to chime in. But I couldn’t share my shame then. I made up a story instead.
“Not all masturbation involves thinking, though. Not all of it is knowing, I mean. For me, I started masturbating when I was very young. Like really young. Like my penis was there, then one thing leads to another…you know. I don’t know how it came about for you guys, but it wasn’t about lust then. It is now, for sure, but then it was different. And I really don’t think it goes against God’s plan for our bodies or whatever. Like, those parts are there, right? I wasn’t trying to hack my body or use it for any purpose. I did what felt good to me. It was innocent. I didn’t really understand what sex was. So, yeah, I think that maybe most masturbation could be considered un-Biblical, but I don’t think it’s actually the act itself. It’s hard to define.”
Nothing I said was true. Not a single word of it. I bloomed later, however innocently, and I didn’t believe that God existed. But it was the most honest way I knew how to communicate my anxieties. Though it was a lie, it wasn’t a lie first and foremost. It was an argument. I wasn’t obligated to tell them about all my insecurities. I didn’t tell them to my closest friends. These guys weren’t my closest friends, no matter what David said or thought. This was the best way to show them what I meant. That was my reasoning then.
“I don’t want to be a dick, but I find that hard to believe. You had to be thinking about something, and even if you did it innocently, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t going against God’s plan for sex. Like, if a 3-year-old steals from a store, we wouldn’t lock him up, but that doesn’t mean that we have to say shoplifting isn’t a sin,” said David.
“It’s the truth. I wasn’t thinking about people or undressing them in my head or something. It was just playing around.” I was uncomfortable.
“Give me details, then. How young were you when you started?”
“I don’t want to get into it.”
“But that’s a critical part of what you’re trying to say. If you want to convince us, then you need to be real with us, Jacob.”
“It’s pretty personal. I’m not comfortable talking about it in detail.”
“If it was so innocent, why can’t you talk about it?”
“I’ve said what I was trying to say. That’s my whole point.”
“I get it. And you don’t have to share anything you don’t want to, but I think this is a great opportunity for everyone to be totally real. Everybody’s been really open tonight. I know you came up a little later, but everyone’s been spilling some heavy shit up here. It’s all good. This is a safe place to talk.” It wasn’t.
“Let’s just move on.” I wished I hadn’t spoken. I was caught in a lie, but I was also caught in truth that I was unequipped to deal with.
“Jacob, I talked earlier about my experience with sex. That was embarrassing for me. That was really personal. But I think we all got something out of talking about it. I opened up to you, and everybody else has, as well, so you should really open up to us. Let’s talk through this. How young were you? How did it all start?”
You are not my therapist, David Hedley. I am not a book for you to read. I wished I were still doing card tricks with Henry. I fingered the jokers in my pocket that I’d taken from the deck to make the magic work. I palmed one in my sweaty left hand.
“He doesn’t have to share anything he doesn’t want to,” said Greg.
“Yeah, but…” David interjected.
“It’s good that you’ve shared stuff, but nobody should have to talk about anything they’re not comfortable sharing.”
“Well, alright.”
The circle had gone cold to me. The air had gone cold as well. Gusts of wind passed over us. They shook the flames a bit. I was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt. I scooted forward. It was dark out. The firelight illuminated Henry’s face. He looked at me with one thoughtful eye. His glance drifted down. He’d spotted my card. He understood.
Things were quiet for a while. I’d thrown David off his train of thought, I guess. A lot of the others had mentally checked out. Several hadn’t said a word since Henry and I had planted our chairs. I felt sick. I listened to the fire crack, shooting sparks into the sky. We were deep into nowhere, and the stars shone clearly. The dry smoke fought to overcome the scent of the wet earth. Over the house below, mountains and hills rolled together in a sleepy wave. I found these things assuring in the same way as Henry’s glance. I was already feeling isolated, so I enjoyed feeling alone, at least somewhere nice.
The silence was unstable, of course. We were all waiting for someone else to speak and deem what topics were meaningful enough for teens such as ourselves to chatter about so that we could break the meditative quietness of the scene. Our pause carried a distinct lack of humility, I guess. David made eye contact with me like he was asking permission, but he wasn’t awaiting a response. He scanned his audience. He swallowed and inhaled.
“Let’s keep this going. I think that we’re getting a lot of stuff done tonight. Does anyone else have something you need to get off your chest? It doesn’t have to be a confession or anything. Just anything in your life you need to talk about. There’s no judgement here.”
Isaac sniffled audibly. For the second time since I’d met him, I thought that he was not where he belonged. Nobody belonged here, except for future youth pastors, I suppose, but this had to be particularly crappy for him. He was innocent entirely, and he had to sit through all this bullshit. I hoped that he could see through it. I hoped he wasn’t taking it to heart. I felt shitty of course, but it had to be worse for him; to think this is reality, to think that this is what brotherly love looks like. This circle isn’t worth your secrets, Isaac, even for all its good intentions. All eyes were on him. His hands were in his shirt. He was visibly cold, and he looked nauseous and pale.
“There’s something that happened last spring that nobody knows about except for my family and a therapist, and I really haven’t figured out how to talk about it, but ever since it happened, you guys here have been my closest friends, and I’ve wanted to tell somebody since I got here. Well, people do know about it, but they don’t know how I fit into it. But it’s kind of a long story, and it’s very sad.”
“Go ahead. We literally have all night. Let’s be completely open,” said David, eagerly assuming a caring tone. He was sure that he could handle anything that came at him. In his estimation, his sensibilities were invincible.
“I don’t really have a lot of friends. I know…real shocker. Like, there’s lots of people I’m friends with, and everyone’s nice to me, but there aren’t so many I can talk with like this—people who I can get close to and stuff. But there was one guy in my church, Logan, who I got close to. I learned that he went to the same school as me, but I’d never seen him before. We hung out a lot. He was always so nice to me, and he didn’t look down on me. He played video games with me. Just the little stuff to show that he cared. To show that he really liked being with me and wasn’t just humoring me like the others.” Jonathon was sobbing at this point. I wished I could stand up and hug him, my tent-mate, before anyone had to hear the rest of the story. I knew he had to say it, but whatever it was, I didn’t think this was a place that would know how to support him. I know I wouldn’t have. I didn’t know how to help anybody. David was engrossed. Everyone else was uncomfortable. Isaac was looking for a steady rock, but he’d found himself a few pebbles and some papier-mâché, myself included.
His words were difficult to decipher through his pained, sliding pitch. He never meant to cry in our presence, but the sound was familiar to us all. “One Sunday, everything seemed totally normal. Logan came to youth group. He talked to me, specifically. He didn’t give me a hint that anything was wrong. We played ping-pong and just talked like usual. He said he had to go somewhere. He gave me a hug. That was the only remarkable thing about it. It was a really tight hug. He was my only friend who loved me like that. Ever.
“Later, we found out what had happened the night before. He’d shot…he’d fucking shot everyone in his house with his dad’s gun. His mom, his dad, his little sister. He went from room to room in the night. He’s in prison now. He murdered all of them. I don’t know why. I don’t know what happened that made him go that far. I don’t know what he could have possibly been feeling then. He came to me knowing it would be the last thing he would do that could just be normal. Why me? What was so special about me?
“He did something so awful, but he was still my friend. I’m so glad that I was who he saw as someone to be normal with. Or that I was someone that he would share that kind of moment with before they got him. It’s not really that I’m glad that I was helpful for him specifically, but that it’s possible for me to mean that to anybody—that I can help somebody in that way. I can know for a fact he wasn’t humoring me.
“But I also knew his mom and his dad and his sister. She was fourteen. I can’t believe they’re all dead. And now I have no friends left. I haven’t spoken to Logan since he hugged me by the ping-pong table, and I don’t want to. And now that I know that I can make friends for real, I don’t know whether I can have any ever again. You guys are different though. I’m so glad I have you if only for a few weeks.”
He cried violently, but it was muffled. He was gagging on his own sobs and choking on his breaths. He was shaking like he had a deadly fever. He was clutching his jacket with rigid fingers. He stared into the circle, looking at nothing, pale as death. I was horrified. It was so entirely unfair. It was just fucking cruel. I didn’t know how I could even begin to help, so I looked away from the sick image before me.
The others were shocked as well. We were all frozen in place. It was entirely reasonable to be shocked. But this was a cry for support. Who was going to try to deliver? It took a second.
“I am so sorry,” said David, who seemed humbled. He knew that this was more than he was equipped to deal with. It was more than any of us imagined dealing with. “I am so, so sorry, Jon. Shit. That is actually the most tragic thing I’ve heard told firsthand, man. And you’re incredible for continuing to live and do things with that on your shoulders.”
He was so much better than I expected.
Henry was the one person who seemed entirely composed. He sounded a little cold. “That sounds really difficult. And you’re dealing with it in a mature way. But Bryce wasn’t your friend for what he did to you. You should definitely not try to contact him. Friends don’t put the weight of their murder-spree on other friends. You need to—”
“This isn’t about any of that.” Len, who had been silent all evening, cut him off there. He turned toward Isaac with intentionality. “Jon, that’s really tough, and I’m sorry. We have a lot of questions that we don’t have answers for and hurts that we can’t justify, and it’s going to stay that way. The only guy who knows all that stuff is God, not any of us. So you should talk to Him about it. All we can do is love you and be brothers for you during what little time that we have you. I love you, Jon. We all do. And God loves you. I know we’re going to pray more later, but I think one of us should pray right now.”
“That’s a great idea. I can pray if everyone’s okay with that,” said Greg.
Everyone agreed.
“God, we thank You for this evening. We thank You for bringing us together to share our sins and our fears and our pain with one another with a focus on You, Lord. Right now, I want to pray in particular for Isaac Wren. Lord, he has been through something tragic and awful, and he needs Your Love and Your mercy, God. We are humble before your plan. We cannot comprehend why things that are so awful can happen. But we know that Your plan is good. We know that there are good things to come. We know that You have redeemed us and that You love us. Isaac has shown strength and courage by living and continuing to love You in the hardest of times. We pray that You lift him up and bring him peace. Amen.”
Amen.
Say what you will about Christian teens, but I don’t know any other group that age that does that for one another.
David Hedley was ready to speak once again. He sat up with his back straight and his gaze direct. “One of the really incredible things that we learn from the Bible is that everything happens for a reason. I think Len hit on that. God has a plan for everything that’s been in place since the beginning of time. Like, God planned which flavor of oatmeal I’d choose this morning. He knew each word that would come out of my mouth. God created the universe knowing that this conversation would happen. And that also means that God planned for bad things to happen. Evil, horrifying things. It’s tempting to imagine that God doesn’t really know anything about the bad things that happen in this world or that those things are totally separated from Him, but that’s not true.
“But when you think about it, that’s actually really comforting. Even though things feel irredeemable, even though the world seems to be in chaos, it’s all under control, and it’s in good hands. That doesn’t mean we can’t grieve the terrible things that exist in a fallen world, but we shouldn’t despair. We should praise God. I haven’t ever gone through anything like what you’ve gone through, but when things go wrong in my life, I try to look past myself and the small picture that I’m in and think about the big picture I can’t see.”
“Thanks, David,” Isaac muttered.
There was more talking that evening. There were more confessions and more deliberation over what does and what doesn’t count as a sin. I made one. I confessed that I was a liar. Not explicitly about what I’d said earlier about my history with masturbation, but more generally about how in the previous few years I had been lying more frequently, irrationally feeling like I had things that needed to be hidden. Feeling that I couldn’t share who I really was. The circle of boys was confused, but Henry understood. He said he was the exact same way. He felt that he did it because he didn’t do a good enough job caring about other people.
Then we prayed. David opened and closed the prayer, but we all prayed for each other. For pain and for sins; for death and for porn. We hurt one another, we demeaned ourselves, we babbled without understanding, and we deeply loved one another. Despite my judgement and discomfort, I had no meaningful insight above the circle. I felt separated from that group, but though I was on my own trajectory, I was their peer. David was wrong about much, but he was right about our love for one another and the value of our communal vulnerability. I wanted to escape vulnerability. He tried to help while I remained silent except to speak about myself. I prayed for Wright. His aunt was sick. David prayed for me—for my faith, for my honesty, and for my sexual purity. Isaac was prayed for more than once, and between popcorn prayers, we heard his sharp breaths blead into the crackle of the dying fire only to be interrupted by another young man who didn’t know what to say but wanted deeply to love and to help. Amen.
There wasn’t much fire left to put out. A few shoes managed it. We collected the chairs and the fragments thereof, and the group began to make its way back to the house. Close side-by-side and wordlessly, Henry and I tailed them in a gentle descent from the dead blaze and the empty circle. I wished him goodnight and slid each joker into the pack with his kin, where he belonged at least sometimes.
“Thanks for doing card tricks with me, Jacob.”
“Good-night, Henry.”
I crept alone into my one-man tent onto my inflated pad. I nestled into my sleeping bag and rolled up tight to weather the cold that had descended from the hill. Once I was safe and alone, I was angry. I was afraid and red-hot mad. I was mad at David, I was mad at myself, I was mad at Logan, a man I’d never met, and I was mad at God, someone I didn’t think existed. I stared in horror at the uncovered secret that I didn’t know how to navigate this world at all. So I tried to keep the volume down while I cried in a tent hoping to sleep a bit before being thrown on a bus first thing in the morning. I felt for all of us, men of the circle, our exclusive club of broken young men in vague uncertainty. And I was furious at it all.
After I had sulked forever, a light shone through my thin tent walls. Some boys had rekindled the flame. God knows why. They tossed in cans of insect repellent and sprinted away from the deafening bangs that followed. Again and again. And exhausted I finally slept to the noise of their laughing and screaming as the shrapnel hung in the air.
“I haven't done this in a while.” I was a liar, but this is a lie everybody tells. In reality, I had been avidly practicing card magic right before I'd gone to camp. To avoid the pretension of assuming a character, I opted to show him how my tricks work, like a light tutorial, rather than actually performing. I was much more interested in watching Henry’s reactions. I pulled out the jokers for a card-counting trick.
When I first joined the Sioux, I didn't think any of our trips would lead to being comfortably seated at a picnic table exchanging card tricks with a buddy for hours, but this was not the first time the tribe had subverted my expectations. The boys camp was divided into several age groups, each of which took its name and theme from an American Indian tribe. I'd progressed through a number of these attending camp summer after summer. This was my seventh year. Over all that time, I’d fallen in love with the place. It had a big lake in the middle furnished with a water slide, diving boards, and a huge, inflated blob off of which we would catapult one another. I couldn't think of a better place for a boy to spend two weeks. It was equal parts fun and spiritual, and the strong Christian messages and encouragement always left me feeling closer to God by the end.
After the summer two years prior, I had to choose how I would progress. I could remain in the Iroquois tribe and stay at camp doing all the things I’d enjoyed in the past, or I could join the Sioux, who would take off for most of the session, hiking all around the Southeast. I chose Sioux in a heartbeat.
Henry gently applauded my slight-of-hand and took back the deck. We were losing light. He spread the cards. I leaned in to make a selection when a crash came from the top of the hill followed quickly by the uproarious laughter of the fifteen or so guys who’d gone up ten or twenty minutes earlier. David Hedley came sprinting down, nodded at us, and grabbed two more frail plastic chairs from the patio. “We’ve already broken two of these just by sitting on them,” he explained. I’d met David the previous year. Then, he was unremarkable, though fairly nice as far as I could remember. He’d come back unrecognizable, with earrings and long hair. He’d put on some weight. His manner of speaking was different—calm and self-assured. He ran back up the slope with seat backs under his arms shouting, “I got you covered!”
Len and Isaac were the only other guys still with Henry and me at the base, reclining in their hammocks. Len looked up at the fire that the others were constructing. “Isaac and me are gonna go up.” I think that was an invitation. I could hear them laughing up there. The Sioux had inevitably grown close in the last week and a half, and we entertained ourselves with long, freely roaming conversations. I knew how those went. I was perfectly content to stay down with Henry for now. Henry looked back at me with only one of his eyes.
I'd met him the previous summer, my first Sioux year. I was curious about him. He was a little odd. He had wild, unkempt dirty-blond hair and a truly unusual selective lazy eye, which would drift to the side but could spring back into its place if Henry so commanded it. He had explained that he'd been hit on the head as a kid. That could explain multiple things. He would play the game “Five Finger Fillet” in which one spreads his fingers on a table and strikes between them with a knife. His stabbing was prestissimo, and he would slide his hand around the table, all to the grave consternation of us onlookers. He spoke with conviction on any topic no matter how trivial, and he seemed to navigate the world with a great degree of care. He was opinionated, but thoughtful and open-minded—a really pleasant guy to spend time with overall. I got to know him fairly well that first year. The trips were tough, and we two hiked long days and talked together, though not much more than we did with other guys.
This year, the two trips had been easy. First, we’d scaled Mount Michael. Then we’d embarked on a short kayaking trip, which was intense, but brief. Now we were spending a night outside the home of a friend of the camp. We called him Doc. We had access to refreshments and flush toilets, so in our view we really living it up. It wasn’t the sort of challenge that I had wanted from a Sioux experience, but I got that the first year. A more relaxed approach was welcome. I'd made such good friends there and had such little time to just be with them.
Our afternoon there so far had been pleasant. We’d set up camp in the large yard. Most of the others had to improvise because they had hammocks, which were light, but there was no abundance of trees on which to hang them. They frantically pinned themselves up to the columns of the raised porch. I’d opted to carry a tent because I’d always preferred a sleeping bag, so I was able to sit back, laugh, and watch them scurry. When everything was set, Doc let us shoot skeet in his backyard. Considering that I’d never fired a shotgun before, I was pretty good at it. At that time, I was hanging out with Len, a huge dude and an actual Sioux Indian, who was new to this session of the summer. He was likeable and funny, if a bit dim. He and I joked around, and Isaac passively listened in and laughed hysterically.
Isaac was a scrawny, autistic, supremely white guy. I'd known him the previous year. He immediately appeared to be out-of-place when I first met him. When I laid eyes on the guy, I was genuinely concerned about how well he'd hold up to the hiking. My concern doubled when I discovered that he had brought a heavy, two-person tent in no way designed to be carried on someone’s back for a long hike. When we’d hit the trail, it was immediately obvious to me that he shouldn't be there. We were only an hour in, and he was breaking down. He was crying. He had no clue how difficult this would be. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I judged his parents for letting him join the tribe. It seemed to be such a patently bad idea. He stopped often and slowed the group down, crying, complaining, and sweating buckets. I started to wonder if we would have to turn back, but several breakdowns later, he along with the rest of us eventually made it to the campsite—a soft, brown clearing surrounded by tall, thick trees that hid the sun.
“Alright, everybody set up camp!” said Sean, our group leader. The others got out their hammocks and tarps and found trees that would hold their weight. I inflated my pad, and laid my sleeping bag on top of it, carefree. Sean seemed worried. “Jacob, do you have, like, a tent?”
“Nope!”
“Well, how do you expect this to work?”
“I'm going to sleep under the stars… like the other campouts.”
“You know it's supposed to rain this whole trip, right? We discussed this more than once.”
I was such an idiot. I never listened to a damn thing anyone said to me, and now it was time to panic. Apparently, I’d looked at the wrong packing list, and never considered that there was a major omission. To this day, I have no idea how I managed to survive sixteen years being this stupid. I was out in the woods without shelter, and it was going to pour. My first idea was to sleep under one of the hammocks and make use of its overhead rain tarp.
“So you want to sleep in a mud puddle,” Sean retorted.
God damn it. At this point, my plan was to pray to God to cancel the rain. Not my best plan, but it was all I had to go on for the time being. But then I remembered the ridiculous two-person tent that Isaac was carrying. It had escaped my mind because he had yet to set it up. He was sitting on the dirt, still recovering from his long hike. We hadn’t interacted much, but I approached him. I asked him if he would mind sharing his tent with me. He was very resistant. I felt awful, because I knew he was having a tough trip, and I was making it worse due to my failure to prepare. I tried to sweeten the deal. By the conclusion of our negotiation, I had to carry his tent and most of his food, but at least I had a place to sleep. He now had a lighter bag than anyone’s. Mine was now so heavy, I struggled to lift it off the ground. But it rained hard that night.
I’m glad that it worked out that way because our hikes were much more interesting when Isaac was happy. It still wasn’t easy for him, but things were never nearly as bad as that first day. We discovered that he possessed the unmatched ability to memorize entire episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants, and he would recite them in proper time with fantastic impressions and sound effects as we hiked. I still feel guilty for imposing on him, but I think the trip worked out better for everyone due to my stupid mistake. This year, I had brought a much lighter one-person tent. He had a hammock.
Henry winked and pulled my card out of his wallet—a twist I had not anticipated. It took me a good forty seconds to figure out how he did it, so I was suitably impressed, and I complimented his dexterity. It was now evening. Tobias came down the hill to use the restroom. As he walked by, he warned us, “If and when you join us, everyone’s having a really serious talk. Spillin’ their hearts and shit, so be respectful going up there. But you really should go up. You can play cards later.” I hadn’t even noticed that they had gone quiet.
So after a moment of deliberation, we boxed up the cards, chose the two least broken chairs from the side of the house, and headed up the hill toward the fire just in time to see the tail end of a spectacular sunset which I would later discover my disposable camera had failed to capture. We attempted to enter the circle as quietly as possible. I set my chair next to Henry’s. I sat in it and immediately fell through. Some of my tribemates laughed, but their chortles were sufficiently subdued to indicate to me that the tenor of the conversation really had changed. Tobias quietly invited me to the other side of the fire where he had an extra chair left by one of the guys now sitting on the ground closer to the warmth of the fire. The counselors were in the house with Doc and his wife. They left us alone to talk as peers.
David Hedley continued his orchestration of the conversation in a quiet and deadly serious voice. “Who of you here is not a virgin?” He promptly thrust his hand into the air. One or two others sheepishly followed. The true number may have been higher, but we weren’t quite sure what he was getting at. My hand was honest in its rest.
“Really. Just a few. Wow. That’s good. Like, the high-school culture of today might tell you that virginity is something bad, but it’s really just the opposite. When I raise my hand, I’m not trying to brag. It’s not something I’m proud of.” I think David had said something about wanting to be a youth pastor. From the youth pastors I’ve known, he’d fit right in. “Well, we’re all big boys here,” he continued, “so I’m going to talk a little bit about it.” I think he’d overestimated the profundity of his utterances, but we were going to hear about his sex life regardless. The conversation had gotten “real” enough that nobody groaned, at least not audibly.
He told us about his now ex-girlfriend, their relationship, and how it led to him having regular sex. “Sex feels good. Sex feels great. But I wish I saved it for marriage. That’s what God wants. God gave us these rules because he knows what’s best for us. Because when I had sex, it was just about feeling good. It wasn’t about commitment or anything sacred. But most importantly, it goes against what God tells us to do.
“Really, sex outside of marriage is gross. Like, if you think about it, when you have sex with someone, you’re really also having sex with all the dudes she’s ever had sex with. And then you’re really having sex with all the girls they’ve had sex with. That can be a ton of people outside of God’s perfect standard of true, committed monogamy. And the germs and juices and shit all stay around. Like all the stuff that comes with sex is just getting thrown around. It’s gross. And now, if you marry and have sex with my ex-girlfriend, it’s kind of like you’re having sex with me. Which is gay.”
Unfortunately, this was the sort of thing which often passed for “deep” conversation among very Christian teens, at least in my experience. I think it’s the only way some of these guys knew how to talk about sex. I had finally matured enough to realize that this kind of talk never accomplished anything other than making some kids feel pious and wise, as they righteously slashed through all the icky things in the world around them, and making others feel secretly ashamed for their inabilities to meet an impossible and suffocating standard. Part of this realization was tied to the fact that I had finally accepted the label of “atheist,” though I had been one for much longer. I kept this fact close to the chest. That’s probably part of the reason I felt a bit isolated from my hiking peers. Though I made some strong friendships, there was a certain fraternal camaraderie within the group that I felt separated from.
“So, no pressure, but do any of you guys who raised your hand want to talk about their experience with premarital sex?” There was a decided silence. No one other than David had spoken since I’d joined the circle. “Okay. That’s fine. No one has to share anything they don’t want to,” he continued, “While we’re on the subject though, I want to talk about something, a sin, that I think that all of us can relate to as guys. I think it’s safe to say that all of us masturbate to some degree.”
“I don’t,” said Isaac in a hushed voice.
That was another issue with these kinds of conversations among the “youth group” youth. Once they entered the sexual realm, there was no return. As teenage boys, we were all thinking about sex and sexuality, but the “Christian spin” usually turned this into an extended session of shame and self-condemnation for being a sexual entity in any capacity. These groups were often much more concerned about what they were allowed to do with their penises than philosophy or morality or theology or any of the ways in which religion actually adds value to people’s lives. At this point I’d finally identified why this perversion of confession made me sick to my stomach.
Greg, a truly kind, good guy whom I had gotten to know in the previous year, had spoken on this matter before in a small group with me and another guy. He reiterated the same shame he’d felt the year before. Nothing had changed. He seemed to have a genuine porn addiction, claiming to go at it three sessions daily at his worst—far more than I ever had. He said that it was the hardest sin for him to escape. He’d failed himself over and over again. He’d failed God.
The word “sin” had been thrown around twice at this point. I wasn’t the only one who picked up on this. Jared asked, “Is masturbation really a sin, though? You’re just touching your own body. Like, maybe it isn’t super healthy to do it constantly, like Henry was saying, for sure, and I definitely do it too much, but I don’t know if it’s inherently sinful. You could make a good argument for watching porn being a sin because that’s clearly lust for someone who you don’t have a right to, but I don’t know if masturbation itself is sinful.” Jared usually joked around. This was the most seriously I’d ever heard him talk.
“Well, maybe not the act itself, like physically, but to masturbate you pretty much have to lust, which is a sin. Unless you’re masturbating to the thought of your wife, I guess, but none of us are in that situation,” said David.
“But, pretending that I don’t use porn, which I do, but pretending I don’t, and pretending I only masturbate to thinking about girls who don’t exist, like an imaginary lifeguard or something, I’m not lusting after someone in particular, so I’m not sure that would be a sin just by the text of the Bible itself.”
“That’s a lot of pretending,” said David.
“Also, Jared, we infer lots of stuff from the Bible. The fact that it isn’t like written explicitly in the text doesn’t mean we can’t know something is wrong if it goes against the Bible’s principles. Not that I don’t masturbate or anything because I totally do, but I still think it’s probably not allowed. Like, I don’t think fapping is part of God’s plan for sex,” Wright added. “I don’t know, though.”
“The idea is… the idea is that our bodies aren’t really ours. Like, God made them, so even though they’re our bodies—well they’re not our bodies—but even though these are the bodies that we’re in, we can’t just do anything to them that we want because they exist for God’s purposes, not ours, you know? Like the whole ‘your body is a temple’ thing. You shouldn’t fap in a temple, I guess. You don’t have the right to do that to your body. Also, I agree with David that it’s lust,” said Tobias.
This conversation went on for a while.
I had a strained relationship with masturbation. I remember the first time. I’d stumbled across an article on nudism, and it fascinated me. There weren’t any photos or graphic descriptions. There was no sex. But the idea of being naked was exciting and new. Into the night, I scrolled through the comments section of the article until I hit the end. I crawled from the floor where I left my iPad charging and rolled onto my bed. Under the sheets, I couldn’t help but squirm. And think. I didn’t imagine other people. I didn’t imagine much at all. It was just about feeling. The sleep shorts I’d long since overgrown slid off, and I lay on my stomach and rubbed gently against the mattress until I was done. Dry. And to me, inexplicable.
I of course later discovered that this was indeed masturbation, though very much unlike the kind of masturbation I had heard of in whispered lunch-table conversations at my Christian middle school. And on top of that, my light imaginings were sexless and serene. I didn’t know why things were different for me. I couldn’t get off in the normal way when I put my hands to the task. If masturbation were a sin, I wished that I could sin normally, in the normal way, so I wasn’t so isolated from the group experiences all around me. And by the time I realized that I was masturbating, I had to deal with something else—the boys who lived in my imaginings. Everything was wrong. But nothing felt wrong. I needed to chime in. But I couldn’t share my shame then. I made up a story instead.
“Not all masturbation involves thinking, though. Not all of it is knowing, I mean. For me, I started masturbating when I was very young. Like really young. Like my penis was there, then one thing leads to another…you know. I don’t know how it came about for you guys, but it wasn’t about lust then. It is now, for sure, but then it was different. And I really don’t think it goes against God’s plan for our bodies or whatever. Like, those parts are there, right? I wasn’t trying to hack my body or use it for any purpose. I did what felt good to me. It was innocent. I didn’t really understand what sex was. So, yeah, I think that maybe most masturbation could be considered un-Biblical, but I don’t think it’s actually the act itself. It’s hard to define.”
Nothing I said was true. Not a single word of it. I bloomed later, however innocently, and I didn’t believe that God existed. But it was the most honest way I knew how to communicate my anxieties. Though it was a lie, it wasn’t a lie first and foremost. It was an argument. I wasn’t obligated to tell them about all my insecurities. I didn’t tell them to my closest friends. These guys weren’t my closest friends, no matter what David said or thought. This was the best way to show them what I meant. That was my reasoning then.
“I don’t want to be a dick, but I find that hard to believe. You had to be thinking about something, and even if you did it innocently, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t going against God’s plan for sex. Like, if a 3-year-old steals from a store, we wouldn’t lock him up, but that doesn’t mean that we have to say shoplifting isn’t a sin,” said David.
“It’s the truth. I wasn’t thinking about people or undressing them in my head or something. It was just playing around.” I was uncomfortable.
“Give me details, then. How young were you when you started?”
“I don’t want to get into it.”
“But that’s a critical part of what you’re trying to say. If you want to convince us, then you need to be real with us, Jacob.”
“It’s pretty personal. I’m not comfortable talking about it in detail.”
“If it was so innocent, why can’t you talk about it?”
“I’ve said what I was trying to say. That’s my whole point.”
“I get it. And you don’t have to share anything you don’t want to, but I think this is a great opportunity for everyone to be totally real. Everybody’s been really open tonight. I know you came up a little later, but everyone’s been spilling some heavy shit up here. It’s all good. This is a safe place to talk.” It wasn’t.
“Let’s just move on.” I wished I hadn’t spoken. I was caught in a lie, but I was also caught in truth that I was unequipped to deal with.
“Jacob, I talked earlier about my experience with sex. That was embarrassing for me. That was really personal. But I think we all got something out of talking about it. I opened up to you, and everybody else has, as well, so you should really open up to us. Let’s talk through this. How young were you? How did it all start?”
You are not my therapist, David Hedley. I am not a book for you to read. I wished I were still doing card tricks with Henry. I fingered the jokers in my pocket that I’d taken from the deck to make the magic work. I palmed one in my sweaty left hand.
“He doesn’t have to share anything he doesn’t want to,” said Greg.
“Yeah, but…” David interjected.
“It’s good that you’ve shared stuff, but nobody should have to talk about anything they’re not comfortable sharing.”
“Well, alright.”
The circle had gone cold to me. The air had gone cold as well. Gusts of wind passed over us. They shook the flames a bit. I was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt. I scooted forward. It was dark out. The firelight illuminated Henry’s face. He looked at me with one thoughtful eye. His glance drifted down. He’d spotted my card. He understood.
Things were quiet for a while. I’d thrown David off his train of thought, I guess. A lot of the others had mentally checked out. Several hadn’t said a word since Henry and I had planted our chairs. I felt sick. I listened to the fire crack, shooting sparks into the sky. We were deep into nowhere, and the stars shone clearly. The dry smoke fought to overcome the scent of the wet earth. Over the house below, mountains and hills rolled together in a sleepy wave. I found these things assuring in the same way as Henry’s glance. I was already feeling isolated, so I enjoyed feeling alone, at least somewhere nice.
The silence was unstable, of course. We were all waiting for someone else to speak and deem what topics were meaningful enough for teens such as ourselves to chatter about so that we could break the meditative quietness of the scene. Our pause carried a distinct lack of humility, I guess. David made eye contact with me like he was asking permission, but he wasn’t awaiting a response. He scanned his audience. He swallowed and inhaled.
“Let’s keep this going. I think that we’re getting a lot of stuff done tonight. Does anyone else have something you need to get off your chest? It doesn’t have to be a confession or anything. Just anything in your life you need to talk about. There’s no judgement here.”
Isaac sniffled audibly. For the second time since I’d met him, I thought that he was not where he belonged. Nobody belonged here, except for future youth pastors, I suppose, but this had to be particularly crappy for him. He was innocent entirely, and he had to sit through all this bullshit. I hoped that he could see through it. I hoped he wasn’t taking it to heart. I felt shitty of course, but it had to be worse for him; to think this is reality, to think that this is what brotherly love looks like. This circle isn’t worth your secrets, Isaac, even for all its good intentions. All eyes were on him. His hands were in his shirt. He was visibly cold, and he looked nauseous and pale.
“There’s something that happened last spring that nobody knows about except for my family and a therapist, and I really haven’t figured out how to talk about it, but ever since it happened, you guys here have been my closest friends, and I’ve wanted to tell somebody since I got here. Well, people do know about it, but they don’t know how I fit into it. But it’s kind of a long story, and it’s very sad.”
“Go ahead. We literally have all night. Let’s be completely open,” said David, eagerly assuming a caring tone. He was sure that he could handle anything that came at him. In his estimation, his sensibilities were invincible.
“I don’t really have a lot of friends. I know…real shocker. Like, there’s lots of people I’m friends with, and everyone’s nice to me, but there aren’t so many I can talk with like this—people who I can get close to and stuff. But there was one guy in my church, Logan, who I got close to. I learned that he went to the same school as me, but I’d never seen him before. We hung out a lot. He was always so nice to me, and he didn’t look down on me. He played video games with me. Just the little stuff to show that he cared. To show that he really liked being with me and wasn’t just humoring me like the others.” Jonathon was sobbing at this point. I wished I could stand up and hug him, my tent-mate, before anyone had to hear the rest of the story. I knew he had to say it, but whatever it was, I didn’t think this was a place that would know how to support him. I know I wouldn’t have. I didn’t know how to help anybody. David was engrossed. Everyone else was uncomfortable. Isaac was looking for a steady rock, but he’d found himself a few pebbles and some papier-mâché, myself included.
His words were difficult to decipher through his pained, sliding pitch. He never meant to cry in our presence, but the sound was familiar to us all. “One Sunday, everything seemed totally normal. Logan came to youth group. He talked to me, specifically. He didn’t give me a hint that anything was wrong. We played ping-pong and just talked like usual. He said he had to go somewhere. He gave me a hug. That was the only remarkable thing about it. It was a really tight hug. He was my only friend who loved me like that. Ever.
“Later, we found out what had happened the night before. He’d shot…he’d fucking shot everyone in his house with his dad’s gun. His mom, his dad, his little sister. He went from room to room in the night. He’s in prison now. He murdered all of them. I don’t know why. I don’t know what happened that made him go that far. I don’t know what he could have possibly been feeling then. He came to me knowing it would be the last thing he would do that could just be normal. Why me? What was so special about me?
“He did something so awful, but he was still my friend. I’m so glad that I was who he saw as someone to be normal with. Or that I was someone that he would share that kind of moment with before they got him. It’s not really that I’m glad that I was helpful for him specifically, but that it’s possible for me to mean that to anybody—that I can help somebody in that way. I can know for a fact he wasn’t humoring me.
“But I also knew his mom and his dad and his sister. She was fourteen. I can’t believe they’re all dead. And now I have no friends left. I haven’t spoken to Logan since he hugged me by the ping-pong table, and I don’t want to. And now that I know that I can make friends for real, I don’t know whether I can have any ever again. You guys are different though. I’m so glad I have you if only for a few weeks.”
He cried violently, but it was muffled. He was gagging on his own sobs and choking on his breaths. He was shaking like he had a deadly fever. He was clutching his jacket with rigid fingers. He stared into the circle, looking at nothing, pale as death. I was horrified. It was so entirely unfair. It was just fucking cruel. I didn’t know how I could even begin to help, so I looked away from the sick image before me.
The others were shocked as well. We were all frozen in place. It was entirely reasonable to be shocked. But this was a cry for support. Who was going to try to deliver? It took a second.
“I am so sorry,” said David, who seemed humbled. He knew that this was more than he was equipped to deal with. It was more than any of us imagined dealing with. “I am so, so sorry, Jon. Shit. That is actually the most tragic thing I’ve heard told firsthand, man. And you’re incredible for continuing to live and do things with that on your shoulders.”
He was so much better than I expected.
Henry was the one person who seemed entirely composed. He sounded a little cold. “That sounds really difficult. And you’re dealing with it in a mature way. But Bryce wasn’t your friend for what he did to you. You should definitely not try to contact him. Friends don’t put the weight of their murder-spree on other friends. You need to—”
“This isn’t about any of that.” Len, who had been silent all evening, cut him off there. He turned toward Isaac with intentionality. “Jon, that’s really tough, and I’m sorry. We have a lot of questions that we don’t have answers for and hurts that we can’t justify, and it’s going to stay that way. The only guy who knows all that stuff is God, not any of us. So you should talk to Him about it. All we can do is love you and be brothers for you during what little time that we have you. I love you, Jon. We all do. And God loves you. I know we’re going to pray more later, but I think one of us should pray right now.”
“That’s a great idea. I can pray if everyone’s okay with that,” said Greg.
Everyone agreed.
“God, we thank You for this evening. We thank You for bringing us together to share our sins and our fears and our pain with one another with a focus on You, Lord. Right now, I want to pray in particular for Isaac Wren. Lord, he has been through something tragic and awful, and he needs Your Love and Your mercy, God. We are humble before your plan. We cannot comprehend why things that are so awful can happen. But we know that Your plan is good. We know that there are good things to come. We know that You have redeemed us and that You love us. Isaac has shown strength and courage by living and continuing to love You in the hardest of times. We pray that You lift him up and bring him peace. Amen.”
Amen.
Say what you will about Christian teens, but I don’t know any other group that age that does that for one another.
David Hedley was ready to speak once again. He sat up with his back straight and his gaze direct. “One of the really incredible things that we learn from the Bible is that everything happens for a reason. I think Len hit on that. God has a plan for everything that’s been in place since the beginning of time. Like, God planned which flavor of oatmeal I’d choose this morning. He knew each word that would come out of my mouth. God created the universe knowing that this conversation would happen. And that also means that God planned for bad things to happen. Evil, horrifying things. It’s tempting to imagine that God doesn’t really know anything about the bad things that happen in this world or that those things are totally separated from Him, but that’s not true.
“But when you think about it, that’s actually really comforting. Even though things feel irredeemable, even though the world seems to be in chaos, it’s all under control, and it’s in good hands. That doesn’t mean we can’t grieve the terrible things that exist in a fallen world, but we shouldn’t despair. We should praise God. I haven’t ever gone through anything like what you’ve gone through, but when things go wrong in my life, I try to look past myself and the small picture that I’m in and think about the big picture I can’t see.”
“Thanks, David,” Isaac muttered.
There was more talking that evening. There were more confessions and more deliberation over what does and what doesn’t count as a sin. I made one. I confessed that I was a liar. Not explicitly about what I’d said earlier about my history with masturbation, but more generally about how in the previous few years I had been lying more frequently, irrationally feeling like I had things that needed to be hidden. Feeling that I couldn’t share who I really was. The circle of boys was confused, but Henry understood. He said he was the exact same way. He felt that he did it because he didn’t do a good enough job caring about other people.
Then we prayed. David opened and closed the prayer, but we all prayed for each other. For pain and for sins; for death and for porn. We hurt one another, we demeaned ourselves, we babbled without understanding, and we deeply loved one another. Despite my judgement and discomfort, I had no meaningful insight above the circle. I felt separated from that group, but though I was on my own trajectory, I was their peer. David was wrong about much, but he was right about our love for one another and the value of our communal vulnerability. I wanted to escape vulnerability. He tried to help while I remained silent except to speak about myself. I prayed for Wright. His aunt was sick. David prayed for me—for my faith, for my honesty, and for my sexual purity. Isaac was prayed for more than once, and between popcorn prayers, we heard his sharp breaths blead into the crackle of the dying fire only to be interrupted by another young man who didn’t know what to say but wanted deeply to love and to help. Amen.
There wasn’t much fire left to put out. A few shoes managed it. We collected the chairs and the fragments thereof, and the group began to make its way back to the house. Close side-by-side and wordlessly, Henry and I tailed them in a gentle descent from the dead blaze and the empty circle. I wished him goodnight and slid each joker into the pack with his kin, where he belonged at least sometimes.
“Thanks for doing card tricks with me, Jacob.”
“Good-night, Henry.”
I crept alone into my one-man tent onto my inflated pad. I nestled into my sleeping bag and rolled up tight to weather the cold that had descended from the hill. Once I was safe and alone, I was angry. I was afraid and red-hot mad. I was mad at David, I was mad at myself, I was mad at Logan, a man I’d never met, and I was mad at God, someone I didn’t think existed. I stared in horror at the uncovered secret that I didn’t know how to navigate this world at all. So I tried to keep the volume down while I cried in a tent hoping to sleep a bit before being thrown on a bus first thing in the morning. I felt for all of us, men of the circle, our exclusive club of broken young men in vague uncertainty. And I was furious at it all.
After I had sulked forever, a light shone through my thin tent walls. Some boys had rekindled the flame. God knows why. They tossed in cans of insect repellent and sprinted away from the deafening bangs that followed. Again and again. And exhausted I finally slept to the noise of their laughing and screaming as the shrapnel hung in the air.
