The Fire of Faith

The Fire of Faith

            The bonfire snapped and cracked as its flames bounded around the small pile of wood beneath it. Even though the night was not an abnormally cool one for late summer, I stretched out my hands and felt the searing warmth of the fire. I looked over to see Jesse and Tommy laughing in the flickering orange light. A hand clamped down upon my shoulder, and I turned to see Jon’s figure emerge as he steadied himself to climb over the crude log bench I was sitting upon. The deafening roar of the crickets and bullfrogs and the chatter of the youth surrounding the campfire was then broken by a single commanding voice.

            “All right, before we begin tonight, does anyone have anything they’d like to share?” The Wednesday night youth leader of our church was sitting on a log next to the fire.

~

            In Kirkland, Quebec, I sat in the open window of my room with my legs dangling in the night. The more I went over the looming fear of heading to another new high school in just a few weeks, the more my mind tightened and my eyes swelled.

            At only fifteen, I had now been in Kirkland for maybe six months, and had moved three times in the past five years. I was tired, calloused, depressed, anxious, and most of all: fed-up. Though moving and the development of an ever-growing anxiety disorder had made life difficult, I had always managed to keep a flame of faith flickering in my chest. Sometimes, like when I stopped going to school in the eighth grade, the flame seemed no bigger than that on the wick of a candle. Still, it remained – and I remained.

            This night, in Kirkland, however, I truly believed the flame had gone out.

            “I just want to sit in the window,” I screamed at my father. I struggled wildly to get free from him as he attempted to hold me in place and calm me down. I had never seen such fear in my father’s eyes, but still I flailed wildly. I felt smothered, and I simply needed to sit in the windowsill and feel the cool breeze of summer’s end. I could hear the tears in my mother and sister’s voices at my doorway, and I knew I had become irrational. Though I had experienced a handful of panic attacks in the years before, none had been like this one.

            “I don’t know what to do. We’re going to have to call 911,” my father said.

            By the time the policemen arrived in my room, I had calmed down. Though I was still so young, even then I knew that this was the darkest point in my life. I was escorted to the ambulance outside my house despite the fact that I now felt fine – other than being emotionally and physically exhausted.

            After taking in my whole story, and with no real way to treat me, the hospital decided it was best to have me simply stay in a room overnight and then leave in the morning.

            As I lay on the stiff hospital bed, I counted the clean white tiles on the ceiling. The hospital was remarkably quiet that night. I had only been in a hospital once or twice before to visit others, and it had always seemed loud and crowded. The only sound I could hear now, though, was the distant beeps of machines and an occasional muffled conversation. I shuffled around awkwardly in my paper gown and attempted to get comfortable.

            How had it come to this? What was God’s plan for me? In all the years I had moved around, no matter how difficult the trials of life became, I had kept faith. Now I felt as though that faith, that flame, had been extinguished.

~

            Sitting there on the second row of log benches outside my church, an idea suddenly crashed into my mind. It was this moment, right now, that had been the plan all along. Making it to this point and time, surrounded by friends who cared about me, a family who loved me, and attending a school where I felt I belonged, was worth the tribulations I had gone through.

            I knew that this would not be the end of my anxieties and certainly not the end of my hardships, but still, a smile emerged. The sweet, salty tears of a moment of clarity, of renewed faith, dotted my cheeks. I looked once more to my new friends and this place I had arrived at, and then raised my hand.

            “I have something I’d like to share.”

~Short Essay by Ben Gentry