We grew up sitting in the back pew, for the most part anyway. Sometimes it felt like we shouldn’t, like we were sitting the furthest from the message too. Like, because we could slip out without anyone seeing—the preacher’s family or the old people—we weren’t really there.
I remember the building and the part of the service where the pastor brought all the kids up to the front for the children’s thing. And the puppet shows. And we sang up there, performed for the congregation. And he would make it fun…squeezing toothpaste to show us we can’t take our words back. And downstairs in the basement there was a hangout place, and upstairs the frog room. It was an acronym…FULLY RELY ON GOD, or something. Only the teenagers could go to the basement, where there was a foosball table and the walls were all covered with murals. I never made it down for the big kid stuff. We stopped going so much after when I was in the frog room and the guy giving the lesson told us that everyone divorced was going to hell, and so I asked if God understands sometimes, you know, if it’s better for the kids or the parents or everyone because maybe the situation wasn’t healthy and he knew my mom got divorced when I was little, but he said no anyway.
She was going to hell too.
And I didn’t tell my mom because I didn’t want her to know. Not that I cried in the frog room—I didn’t want her to know about hell. So I walked over to the water fountain after, and it tasted like iron.
– Brooke Whitling is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College.