When we lived in Texas, my family attended church almost every week. I enjoyed going, though not because I was particularly devout. I was a chubby foodie (before foodie was a word) and went to church without kicking or screaming because afterward we went out for waffles covered in whipped cream and chocolate sauce at Roscoe White’s Easy Way Café. When I was older, the highlight of my confirmation retreat was, well, the boys—and one in particular, Jeff, the camp bad boy, who brought cigarettes, hidden under his Bible.
The place I finally found God, without any hope for some immediate earthly reward in the form of carbs or boys, was at a secular camp my father went to as a little boy and I attended as well, Camp Longhorn.
The summer after my freshman year of high school was a transformational time. My fellow cabinmates and I were cauldrons of teen drama and hormones. We had the Beatles’ Abbey Road on constant repeat, our moods careening between “Carry That Weight” and “Here Comes the Sun.”
When my high school boyfriend sent me flowers with a note testifying to his longing and devotion, someone in my cabin threw his gift on the ground outside. Who knows why? Envy or boredom, probably. Was it an accident? Who knows? It didn’t matter. My ensuing despair was off the charts. The dramatic weeping and wailing were such that you’d think I was Job, rather than a fifteen-year-old girl prevented from fully enjoying a bouquet of cheap carnations.
As little girls at Camp Longhorn, we’d played pickleball and had swim races. Now, as teens, we played new games—games such as who could overreact the most to a borrowed hairbrush or who could be more traumatized by a perceived insult.
One girl in our cabin, whom I’ll call Kelly, took no part in these hysterics. And yet she seemed sadder than any of us, lost in her headphones and her private pain—related, we were told, to some difficulties her family was having. It was clear to anyone who looked in her eyes that she was hurting badly.
Kelly had trouble sleeping, and sometimes she refused to get out of bed in the morning to go to the required activities. While we went out to swim or sail or laugh over our bowls of cereal, she stayed in bed. We’d also started to notice that she was developing scabs on her arms and legs, scabs unlike the ones the rest of us had from our encounters with brambles and gravel. Eventually we realized that these wounds were self-inflicted. She was cutting herself.
We didn’t understand her despair. The teenager we saw was not the girl we had known all those years. Just the summer before, Kelly had been a rambunctious eighth grader, her eyes filled with light. Now she told us she was tired and wanted to be alone. We felt powerless.
One day, when we returned to our cabin, we found Kelly sitting on her metal bunk bed. She had carved the word HELP into her arm and was bleeding heavily. We ran for help. The camp administrators called her parents and told them there was an emergency. They came to pick her up. She went home for the rest of the summer.
We, her cabinmates and friends, were devastated and confused. We had never experienced pain like that; this was beyond our comprehension. We wondered both how we’d failed her and how someone could hurt so much. As we packed up Kelly’s things for her, a Texas summer storm raged outside. We tried to make sense of her pain. After her departure, we sat in a circle—asking questions, leaning on one another—for the rest of the afternoon. The sound of thunder provided a soundtrack to our melancholy. Flashes of lightning illuminated the tear-soaked faces of girls I had known since first grade.
Finally, depleted, we left our cabin to walk to the cafeteria for dinner. The storm had stopped. In the sky, a rainbow stretched over the lake. Until that day, the rainbows I’d seen had been faint or fleeting. This one was strong and clear—each color a bold bright stripe. The rainbow glistened and glowed so deeply that I gasped upon seeing it and could not turn my eyes away.
The wet grass smelled fresh and new. I breathed in deeply. To me, it was the scent of hope and promise, and of comfort in the face of pain. It reminded me of “Hymn of Promise,” which we sang at the funeral for my grandfather Harold, the first person I loved and lost:
In the bulb there is a flower;
in the seed, an apple tree;
in cocoons, a hidden promise:
butterflies will soon be free!
Gazing at the rainbow, I felt my heart fill with hope. After the deepest pain, here was an offering of peace. There was no question in my mind that God had put this rainbow in the sky.
Back in the cabin that night, I wrote a letter to my father by flashlight. I said I’d been grappling with the question of how someone who was loved could still want to hurt herself. I told him about the rainbow that made me feel the presence of God.
“Dear Dad,” I wrote. “There must be a God. This comfort was a sign.”
From that day on, I knew that there had to be a greater purpose to suffering. Faith to me is not loud or boisterous; it is simply the belief that no pain exists that God cannot take away. I feel the same surety that no matter how difficult something is, God will provide the answer.
When my father picked me up from the last day of camp weeks later—with my boyfriend from home in tow!—he told me how happy he had been to receive that letter.
My father has always been open about his faith. For him, it was talking to Billy Graham and quitting drinking that brought him closer to God. He had his epiphany when he was forty and worried that his life wasn’t going the way he’d hoped. He started reading the Bible every morning before beginning work to center himself, and he’s kept up that habit to this day.
I never saw Kelly again. I’ve often wondered what happened to her. Now, twenty years later, my congregation reads together from The Book of Common Prayer: “Comfort and heal all those who suffer in body, mind, or spirit; give them courage and hope in their troubles, and bring them the joy of your salvation.”
Amen.