I was sitting on a cracked wooden bench on a sticky summer night, surrounded by rows of children, teenagers, and college students talking about Christianity and how to become a better "you."  A fire blazed in the center of our fantastic semi-circle, and twinkling voices of enthusiastic campers sang praises and laughed, enjoying the comfort of friendship and faith.  After the camp director--a tiny man with a soft heart and a powerful voice--finished his message, the summer staff filled the handmade stage and sat alone, sprinkled randomly across the platform.  One by one, the campers approached them, sat with them, and talked to them about troubling circumstances in their lives.  I continued to sit on my cracked wooden bench, thinking about the world that I live in and what could lie beyond it.  I watched fellow junior staff step toward the dotted people, who were only four or five years older than us, and talk to them about the most prominent issues in their lives.  I would watch these children go up to these strangers year after year and talk to them about their lives; I watched them talk to these strangers about emotions that had been buried so deeply that some could not speak a full sentence through their tears.

I could never do it.  I could never bring myself to walk up to the people that I had grown up with and had loved whole-heartedly, and tell them about the biggest obstacle in my life.  I could not bring myself to utter the words, "I don't believe in God."  So I sat on my cracked wooden bench and stared at the stars above me, wondering if I could force myself to understand what my everyone else in my life seemed to know.

I would trudge to church every Sunday and Wednesday, going through the motions, talking about ideas beyond my realm of belief.  I had gone through confirmation (the process of becoming a member of the Methodist church) the year prior to that significant summer night, but always felt as though I should be a Christian and not have any doubts.  After all, "confirm" is only one letter from "conform."  No matter how hard I tried, I could not convince myself that God was real.

So I sat on the cracked wooden bench, my mind confused and sore, my heart as cracked as the wood, as I watched the children receive love and warmth from their personal strangers.  I looked to the stars and noticed that they seemed lonely, too.  They sat in their designated space and waited to die, while I stared at them and thought about what would happen when I died...especially if Heaven was not real. The stars looked identical to each other, despite science's claims that none are the same.  "Everyone is unique"--A phrase promised to many people that feel different from their community, but I knew then, as a fourteen year-old girl, that "uniqueness" is not actually celebrated by the generalized society.  So I stared until I felt the crack on my wooden bench, realizing that I did not want to be separated the way the stars and the pieces of the bench were.

I surrendered.  I surrendered trying to conform to my family's beliefs, I gave up trying to put my experience into my explanations of the Bible, and I gave up the feeling of being separated from the people who knew where they belonged.  I felt like I belonged at that church camp, too, even though not all of us had the same beliefs. 

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