Now Angel was in highschool. He was in religion classes where teachers talked about the history of the Bible, and it was pretty cool. He found a group of friends that were friends before they got to highschool, but they accepted Angel. But Angel was never really part of that group, they had all grown up together, and therefor were friends, Angel always felt like he was missing something when he was around them. He definitely couldn't go back to his "friends" from grade school, he had tried so hard to make it this far and away from them, but he was just an outsider with the other people he was with.
This trend would continue for a long time.
The whole time, he started having harder questions about the Bible that he couldn't find answers to himself, so he started asking teachers. But those teachers didn't have the answers, so they sent him to the pastor at the school, but that pastor didn't have answers either, so he told Angel to pray about it.
Angel had never gotten an answer through prayer, so he hated being told that, but he tried it anyways. Every night before falling asleep he would try and talk to God, but he never heard anything back, and that hurt him. Why was it ok for everyone else to get answers from other people, or from the Bible, or from prayer, but never him? Did he do something wrong? Was he hurting someone? Was that why God was mad and didn't answer him?
His only friend from gradeschool was named Torie. Angel had liked Torie during gradeschool but after telling Cameron, Cameron decided he liked her more, and they started being boyfriend and girlfriend all through eighth grade. There were times when the three of them would be riding to Junior Winds together in the back seat of the car and Cameron and Torie would start kissing, and Cameron would put his hands up Torie's shirt while Angel sat next to them and stared out the window and tried to ignore them.
Then in highschool, they broke up, and Torie started dating a boy from another school. She would ask Angel for advice on him and ask him questions about what boys like. She would then start telling Angel stories about how they would make-out in the back seat of his car, and he had started licking her down-there, and how it felt so amazing. She would call him or message him after every date and tell him all the details. This whole time, Angel like Torie, and being told this stuff made him hurt inside.
He tried to find answers to this pain in the Bible, there were none. But one time, he was flipping through the pages in Job, trying to explain why he was crying, and he got a papercut. It was only a paper cut, but for a moment, he wasn't sad, and crying, he was just angry. So he gave himself another one, and another one. Soon, that page in Job was almost entirely red.
This idea worked too well. Every time Torie would start talking to him about the new thing she had tried with the other boy, he would just take a knife, or a pen or scissors and just make a little cut on his arm. Then while they were talking, he would just agitate it and cause a sting.
This went on until the end of Sophomore year, when Angel asked out a girl himself. Now Torie had told him how much it had hurt to have things go so far with a boy, and then be left alone. So Angel took things very slow with this girl. But soon they were going to Youth Group together, and Angel started to learn more and more things about the history of the Bible and his faith and everything else and in some cases, the Bible was just wrong, or silly, or downright stupid. But he ignored those issues, because he liked the girl and her faith, and he was happy living exactly how he was.
But the questions were still there, unanswerable by everyone, and they were important questions. They festered in his mind. They were a cancer to his faith. What he had always been told was that the Bible had all the answers, but it was turning out that it didn't. He was told that the questions he had were the ones that would never have an answer. They were things that he just had to ignore, otherwise they would drive him insane and make him lose his faith, the foundation of his life.
And they did. He went crazy. Now he wasn't talking to Torie, because his girlfriend had hated that they hung out and were friends, because she was "that" kind of girl. Christianity was the last piece of his childhood left to him, and that was falling out from under him when the questions became too unbearable to just ignore. So everytime he started to think about it, he would just take out his pocketknife and prick himself, just enough to bleed and hurt. His eyes would roll back in his head, and he would be entirely lost in the pain, unable to focus on what was bothering him before. It was bliss.
But eventually, even that wasn't working anymore. One night while the rest of the family was out, Angel was crying on the floor, yelling at heaven. But he realized that he no longer knew who he was yelling at. People were supposed to act like Jesus, but they never did, not for long. People were selfish, people lied, people hurt each other. Christians raped other people, they killed other people, had wars and blamed them on God. The Bible was supposed to have all the answers, but it didn't. There were so many questions that would never have answers, he would always just be told "God works in mysterious ways," he heard that so much that the phrase now simply made him angry. The Bible was supposed to always be right, and it wasn't. There were countless times when he picked up a Bible, especially the old Bibles, in which some stuff was soo crazy, he couldn't believe anyone ever believed it was true. With all of these things weighing down on him, he gave up trying to just fake it anymore.
So he shouted, he cried, every night before bed since then, he asked whomever was listening for a sign, for simple faith, or anything.
It's never come.
No comments:
Post a Comment