“Into the Light”

A place of nature, nurture, and endless space to explore the goodness of God.  

At least that’s what it said on the brochure. But as Ruth tried to focus on the patterns of swamp green rushing by outside the bus window, all she could see was the rain. There was sweat pooling on the underside of her thighs, glossing the plastic seat covers, and the bends of her knees were stiffening. Her body was hardening into position like cement drying. In a couple of minutes, she would be completely solid. A crouched gargoyle, a bus bust. When the window patterns finally stopped swirling, Ruth wondered if she could get up. Would the plaster around her shoulders and knees break into rivers of dust? Her fellow bus riders moved towards the exit doors, and, after a beat, she followed, slowly, creakily, facing the rain.

The hood of a rain jacket poked out from around the corner of the door. It was talking in a perky voice that was most inappropriate for what Ruth imagined a talking rain jacket would sound like.

“Welcome to Mt. Zion Bible Camp! Grab any bags you have, and hustle to the bungalow.”

It took Ruth a second to register that there was a person under the jacket. She had to focus on every word over the smashing of the rain.

Ruth bent down to grab her bags, assuming the “bungalow” was the large wooden gazebo in the middle of the open field. The rain had flooded the expanse, and Ruth followed the herd of slumped rain jackets, maneuvering around landmines of water.

Her bags tumbled into a soggy pile beside her, and she sat on one of the wooden benches that split the bungalow into rows. Flipping her own hood back, Ruth finally looked around. Rain jackets were turning into people all around her, shaking off the rain in bursts of hair flips and shoulder squirms. All around her age, teenagers were parading about, some looking purposefully nonchalant, others as tense as the lines between their eyes. This, Ruth thought with a painful smirk, was camp.

Mt. Zion Bible Camp was not for the well-adjusted, straight-spined, fresh-faced teenagers of John Hughes’s dreams. Nor was it for the addicted, the depressed, the outbursts, the broken rules. Mt. Zion Bible Camp was, in Ruth’s view, for the in-between. The mediocre and the moderate who never took more than their fair share of happiness or of pain. Those whose parents didn’t hate them enough to send them away for the entire summer, but who did need some “space” for a while. The lonely on the threshold of alone. Almost. Not quite. Barely there. Ruth, a 5’3’’ toothless grin with swampy brown hair and a 2.8 GPA, was just that. In-between.

The director was on stage, talking about how God was like this rain — flooding to purify — how this week was going to be cleansing for all of “us.” Ruth thought about water then, how scary it was. How she would much rather burn than drown. She thought about the plural pronoun “us” — how it really didn’t mean plurality, community. It was just a filler, a camp-induced conviction of identity.

“The rules are simply this — love God, love others, love nature, and do not, under any circumstances, talk back to a counselor or director.” Ruth wondered if that was in the Bible. Don’t talk back.

“Commandments are tricky things, aren’t they? They tell you to do, you don’t. They tell you to don’t, you do. Why are we like that?” The boy to Ruth’s left was talking to her. Just like that. No introductions, no social cues. Her neighbor was looking at her with expectant eyes. Despite the rhetorical question, he called for an answer.

“Not everyone is like that,” Ruth mumbled automatically.

“So, commandments are not one-size fit all?”

Ruth paused. “You’re not supposed to talk to strangers.”

He smiled. “I don’t think Moses chiseled that one into stone, but you just proved my point.”

Ruth hoped her lanky neighbor was not mistaking this for witty banter. She just had to survive camp for one week. Seven days. Not enough time to make friends, even if she even wanted to. Even if she knew how. When her mom had sat her down to tell her about the “amazing opportunity” at church camp, she had droned on and on about lasting friendships and memories and the time she bunked with her now life-long friend Cathy. Ruth hated Cathy.

Ruth couldn’t even remember how she had responded. Did she nod? Cry? She did remember the way the basement couch she was sitting on smelled more of mildew than of leather. It reminded her of Cathy’s cat. The one with the constant hairballs.

Ruth shook her head to force herself to focus on the director on stage, who was now calling out cabin groups. Placed in “Cabin Corinth,” Ruth shifted to grab her bags, wondering if she could point out Corinth on a map.

“See you. Watch out for the rain,” Ruth’s chatty neighbor stated, as he turned back to listen to roll call. Ruth hoped not everyone at camp would be so talkative.  

When Ruth walked into the smell of cedar that was Cabin Corinth, four girls turned to look at her. Dinah had just finished tucking the ends of the sheets around her mattress, the pattern of small lilacs fading into its gray background. She was short; her stare long and pointed. Ruth tried to match the look with a spear of her own. Two others, Bernice and Grace, were organizing the bathroom. Bernice simply smiled and winked. Grace gave her a little wave.

Ruth didn’t know how long she stood on the threshold, looking into the cabin with the rain rattling the door behind her. There wasn’t much to look at. Without a warning, she was whipped of her perch and plunged into the room, as Leah — a human pogo stick — fit her hand into hers, talking rapidly about joy and fellowship and bunk bed assignments.

“I’m Leah, your discipleship leader for the week, and this is your bed,” she pointed to the lofted mattress. “This is going to be a week full of vulnerability, grace,” with this she turned and winked at Grace, “redemption, and, most importantly, growth. I am so excited to experience it with you!” She still hadn’t let go of Ruth’s hand. Ruth nodded, feeling her silence expand and plummet like a weight in the middle of the room.

After a beat, “Do you need help with anything? Your bedding? Any decorations? Shower stuff goes under the sink. We’re about to start Bible study, but no rush.” Ruth shook her head, pulling out her white sheets. She noticed none of the other girls had decorations. It was just a week.

After the five minutes it took Ruth to nestle in, the group of girls assembled into a circle in the middle of the cabin. It was so small the metal of the bed frames pinched the skin of Ruth’s lower back, and she squirmed as the five girls looked at each other and the floor.

Leah was reading aloud from the Book of James, the words pulsating, vibrating the cabin air with a redundant rhythm that reminded Ruth of a leaky faucet.

“Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God — who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly — and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith without doubting. For the doubter is like the surging sea, driven and tossed by the wind and rain. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord, being double-minded and unstable in all his ways.”

The other girls’ legs were criss-crossed, knees barely touching. Ruth tried to sneak furtive glances up at the group as she picked the skin around her nails. Bernice’s head rested against the bunk bed’s column; she braided the strands of blonde hair that had fallen from her ponytail. Grace sat across from her in the circle, either entranced by the hair braiding or the bitter storm outside. Dinah was next to Ruth, and her stillness reminded Ruth of the monks who settled themselves on a wall for days. Ruth wondered if the human body was meant to stiffen like that. She sat up straight, never twitching, staring Leah down as the verse fought the rain for sound space.

Ruth couldn’t help but shift weight from hip to hip, positioning her hands around her. She stretched her legs out, then crossed them, leaned forward, then back, feeling like an origami piece whose edges had been creased and roughened by too big fingers and too much time bent.

Leah posed awkward questions to a silent cabin. The girls either nodded or stared at a spot on the wall, trying not to let the tension touch them. Leah answered her own questions brightly, talking about quiet time with the Lord and how suffering had really strengthened her.

Ruth thought about suffering then, about the singularity of it. None of the girls could believe Leah even understood the meaning of the word suffering, let alone been changed by it. But she probably thought the same thing about them.

“Grace, why are you at camp? What brings you here?” Leah’s abrupt question shocked the girls into rapt attention. They didn’t know they’d be called out by name.  

“I come every year with Bernice.” She patted her friend’s knee. “It’s a fun thing to do in the summer.”

Leah clapped her hands. “How great is that! I hope all of you will return next year. Make it a tradition.” She paused. “You’re new, Ruth. What about you? What brings you here?”

Ruth swallowed, trying to come up with something normal to say. She thought she’d give camp a try. She wanted to make lasting friendships and memories. She loved the outdoors.

None of these responses came to her mind. All she could see was the Bible she had stolen from the side table of her Dad’s motel room. The way the thin pages had given her paper cuts.

“I guess I was . . . I am, I mean, curious.”

There was a pause, and Ruth feared the malicious laughter that dominated her high school cafeteria would fill the silence. But there was only silence.

“I love it. Let’s all stay curious, shall we?” Leah ended the study.

~

Ruth fought to remain within the circle of girls; the fringes were the most treacherous in social situations. Most prone to sneak attacks. Also, she was covered by the umbrella if she stood in the middle. After the bible study had finished, the gaggle of girls was making its way down to the amphitheater nestled by the lake. The main topic of conversation: Leah. Could a person really have that much energy without being fake? Did her cheeks hurt from smiling?

“She probably preaches in her sleep. Can’t waste any time growing!” Grace laughed easily.

“Who am I?” Bernice cried, her head seesawing, her brows twisted in a look of either concern or excitement. The girls’ burst of giggles was covered with a furtiveness that betrayed their fear of being overheard. Dinah looked behind them, as if being followed. Ruth was just happy to be a part of the group. She smiled but stayed silent.

They squished their way down the hill, approaching the sixty or so campers filling in the arena. Their hour of free time was constrained to either the prayer tower at the top of the hill or the amphitheater at the bottom. Ruth had been thankful that no one, besides Leah, had suggested the prayer tower, fearing how boring an hour of talking to herself would be.

“‘For after seven more days, I will cause it to rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will destroy from the face of the earth all living things that I have made,’ declares the Lord!” Ruth’s lanky, commandment-breaking neighbor was standing in the middle of the stage, arms outstretched, yelling out to the campers huddled in the stands. A couple of other boys were pretending to drown behind him, gasping for air as their limbs floundered in the make-believe water.

“Levi,” Grace sighed. “He comes every year, too”

His shock of platinum blonde hair moved across the stage in bursts of flailing limbs. A scarecrow in motion.

The girls worked their way into the crowd, meeting people, connecting home towns and friends of friends. Ruth tried to stay near Grace’s shoulder, as she seemed to know everyone from her stint at camp last year. When she let her guard down for a second though, the circles of socialization had shifted, and Ruth was in the danger zone – out on the fringes where she couldn’t hide the fact that she didn’t know anyone.

Without hesitation, Levi swooped in. “Want to go up to the prayer tower?” he asked with a nod up the hill, his smile a wave about to crash on the shoreline.

“Hell, no,” Ruth said immediately, hoping she would never have to step foot in the tall, Gothic bell tower. The hilltop’s eyesore was really just a stone staircase with a cracking foundation. Sometimes Ruth thought it looked like was leaning.

Levi gasped dramatically. “How dare you use the ‘H’ word here, Ruth!”

Ruth took a step back, flustered, wondering how he knew her name. “You responded to that name at roll call, I just assumed.” He shrugged.

“And you’re Levi – the resident student pastor.”

With a flurry of his bobblehead and a little bow, he said, “Charmed, I’m sure. I specialize in fear tactics and shame, the two greatest vehicles of religion.”

Ruth watched him carefully as other people started to group around them, listening to Levi recount how he had gotten detention for standing up in the entryway of his high school and performing a one-man rendition of Revelation, complete with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Ruth watched him act it out again for the camp, realizing suddenly that he had memorized the entire book. He wasn’t reading from the Bible or even stumbling over words.

There was an art to Levi’s story-telling — glaring, cartoonish motions met with a sincerity of speech and desire. Desire for what, Ruth thought. Attention? More than that. Laughter? As Levi finished the play with a somersault, he stood breathing heavily, his chest expanding. Ruth couldn’t help but admire his confidence. She could barely brave the cafeteria, let alone perform for it. She watched Levi’s eyes take in the audience in front of him. Maybe, Ruth thought, his performance was more of a plea, a hunger. He jumped down off the stage to scattered applause. Or maybe, he just liked acting.

~

Ruth was drowning. Gallons of water rushed across her face, her bed, soaking her sponge of a mattress.

She hadn’t slept well for the first couple days of camp, blaming the lumpy mattress, the roar of the rain, the hot air. This was a new level of uncomfortable.

She first awoke to the water. She was mobilized by the yells. Her roommates were drowning too, falling from the bunkbeds in drenched pajamas, hair plastered to their faces in mazes of shapes. Ruth sat up, watching the chaos unfold below her, wondering if the roof of the cabin had caved in, that the rain had – somehow – found them.

“I warned you about the rain. And the flood.” Levi was holding on to the post at the end of her bed, smiling even in the darkness. He whispered it casually as a now empty gallon swayed back and forth in his left hand. Grace was searching frantically for the lights. Ruth saw the other boys from his cabin dart out the door, similar gallons in their hands.

“I couldn’t have been Noah, just this once?”

Levi opened his mouth, maybe to laugh, and then crouched through the window to his right, where Ruth saw he had busted out the screen.

Grace had finally found the lights, and they were all looking around with eyelashes heavy with wetness.

“We all look like . . . wet dogs!” she cried, propping herself up against the wall as the laughter overtook her. Dinah, jumping down from her bed with a squelch, collapsed to the floor in a convulsion of giggles. Ruth patted her matted hair, clutching her stomach as she rocked back and forth, glowing in the glee of the cabin.

After the flood had been dried up, the floor covered in pool towels, and the girls were back in bed, Ruth struggled to fall back asleep. There was still dampness coating the top layer of her mattress. She rolled back and forth, working hard to forget about it and calm her beating heart.

That was when she saw the flashlight blinking outside her window.

Just like Levi. Ruth crawled out of her bed, following the light.

“Levi?” Ruth asked the night as the beam flashed across his blonde hair.

“Ruth.”

He was lying sprawled out in the grass that spanned the distance between the boys’ cabins and the girls’. His long limbs were etched into the ground at awkward angles, but he looked comfortable. Like he could have fallen asleep.

“The stars were distracting tonight.”

Ruth noticed the discarded gallon near his head and realized he had probably been running away when he looked up and just stumbled down to see the stars.

“Your flashlight was distracting tonight.”

“I’m sorry.” A beat. “Not really. You know the stars kind of look like those stick-on ones I used to coat my bedroom ceiling with.”

“I had those too,” Ruth commented, craning her neck upwards. “I still do.”

“Me too.”

A pause. Ruth thought about what her mom said, about memories and life-long friends. She crouched down to lay next to him. “The real stars are better.”

“Agreed.”

The odd pair laid there together, the gangly blonde and the new girl. They watched the stars blink, listening to the quiet that’s reserved for 2 a.m.

The hushed moment lingered. “It’s nice to have someone new here, at camp. I was getting tired of seeing the same old faces,” Levi stated to the sky.

“I don’t even really know how I ended up here,” Ruth admitted. “I probably won’t come back.”

Levi hummed an unasked question. “Give it a chance. The stars are spectacular, and my pranks keep things interesting.”

Ruth laughed. “Well, I’m going to head back to bed. Will you keep your flashlight away from my window?”

He nodded, moving his head to look at her. “You better move fast. My counselor’s about to find me missing.”

Just then a voice called out in a frenzied whisper. “Levi! Levi!”

Levi sighed. “This was the closest I’d come to God all week. And my ‘discipleship leader,’ his air quotes sprang up in the air above him, “ruins it.”

Ruth nodded, taking steps away from him towards her own cabin. She didn’t want to get caught out of bed. That was just as bad as talking back.

~

The next morning in the dining hall, Levi patted the seat next to him, and Ruth slid into place beside him to eat. She started to sit next to him for meals, and then eventually, for Bible studies. It was nice to have someone to sit next to. A routine. Even though Ruth was preoccupied, trying to keep from slicing her fingers open on the thin pages of her Bible, Levi would doodle funny-shaped dogs and play hangman on the margins. The painful camp songs were enhanced by Levi’s flailing dance moves, and he showed her how to brighten a soggy PB & J sandwich with a couple of potato chips.

“Adds a much-needed crunch,” he would say.

~

The last night of camp Ruth woke up to a head floating above her. She immediately cringed, expecting another flood of water. But Levi materialized before her, his finger in front of his lips. The other boys in his cabin were quickly rousing the other girls, and Ruth followed Levi down the bunk bed ladder, out of the cabin, into the dewy grass. He was leading the silent swarm up to the prayer tower. Ruth fought back the knot in her throat that told her to resist. Why the prayer tower in the middle of the night? Why the prayer tower at all?

As the group approached the citadel, Ruth could have sworn it was swaying in the wind. The top of the dark tower merged with the stormy sky above her. The rickety steps creaked as she treaded into the entryway, following close behind Levi.

The teenagers stayed silent as they ascended the steps skyward. She thought about how the cement bricks had probably heard many confessions. Maybe that was why they were quiet – the fear of their secrets cracking the brick.

As they reached the peak of the tower, after what Ruth felt like were hundreds of stairs, fearless Levi reached his arms out, his fingertips almost brushing the walls on either side. Behind him was a massive deck, stretching out into the night sky.

Levi looked at them without his familiar smile, and Ruth realized, suddenly, that he was a boy. Not an actor. Not a scarecrow. Not a bobblehead. Just a lanky boy with arms so long they could grasp the prayer tower.

“This, my friends,” he turned around, “is God.”

They were looking at light. At freedom. At the city shimmering beneath and before them, out in the distance, as if underwater. Mt. Zion Bible camp was meant to be a retreat, an escape, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t find the city lights with the right perspective.

Levi was facing the expanse with distant eyes, as the rest of the group scattered across the deck. The kids felt as if they were facing the world, looking it dead in the eye. No one knew how they measured up. Ruth could taste the fear in the air — the salty, iron feel of a pumping heart and sweaty palms. The lights were so small, so weak; Ruth could close her eyes, and they would evaporate. There was also the slow, breathing beat of finality, as they realized camp was ending, and they would once again be plunged into that light.

No one spoke, afraid of being the voice that stripped the silence of its power. Knees barely touching, they coated the edge of the deck in a wall of shoulders and necks. Some were bent in prayer.

Levi leaned over to Ruth. “I told you this was a good spot,” he smirked.

“You were right.”

“I come up here when I feel like I can’t breathe. When I get overwhelmed by all the verses and the speeches and the studies and the singing and the thinking. Sometimes the storm just gets too bad, you know?” Ruth did know, and she nodded, staring so long at the city lights that they shimmered into a kaleidoscope of glitter across her vision.

~

Ruth started to talk in her head as the lights swarmed. She didn’t know who, or what, she was talking to, but she began to list things. Things she had noticed at camp. Things that mattered. Things that didn’t. The furious storm at the beginning, the lofted beds, the squeaky grass, the cautious giggles fading into bursts of laughter. The way Dinah talks in her sleep and Leah hums in the morning. The way some of the pages in her Bible — the one she had stolen from the motel room – were creased on the edges, smudged with fingerprint ink, coated with Levi’s doodles.

She hadn’t realized her eyes were closed until they were fluttering open. Levi was still staring out, his head slightly tilted, as if he was asking the sky a question. The rest of the kids were gone.

“Did you know my brother killed himself?”

He was talking to her. Just like that. No transitions, no social cues. That was Levi’s style, though. Dive in, head first.

“No, Levi, I didn’t.”

“I guess there’s no way you would have known. It’s not like it leaves a nasty scar.”

She wanted to talk about suffering, then. About the lie of it. She wanted to describe the way wounds that deep don’t scab over. Partly because it still hurts; partly because the healing never ends.

“Levi . . . I,” Ruth started.

“Yeah, I know. You’re sorry and you don’t know what to say and you’re praying for me and all of that. Thanks, I guess.”

She paused.

“It was my first summer at camp without him. And I felt so weird this time. I was so normal before it, you know? I was an average guy with an average family and an average, lukewarm, kind-of good, kind-of not life. I was the subtly weird, somewhat likable guy whose brother looked oddly like him. And laid out under the stars with him. Now . . .”

“Not so much,” Ruth finished.

“Yeah, not so much.”

Ruth didn’t know much about death; her estranged uncle had died in a car crash when she was little. She hadn’t even cried at the funeral. Was she supposed to hug Levi? Tell him it was all going to be all right?

“Why are you telling me this, Levi?” Ruth asked quietly.

He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. You were new; you didn’t know him. You didn’t know me with him. I guess . . . Maybe I just needed to say it out loud.”

Ruth nodded. “I told my dad I hated him once. It felt good to say it out loud, too.”

Levi’s eyes widened, but he said nothing.

“Can I ask you a question?” He said finally. Ruth nodded. “Where did that Bible come from? The one you use in worship. It’s a King James translation.”

“You noticed?” Ruth laughed quietly. “I stole it from my dad’s motel room the same day I told him I hated him. He told me to get out, and I don’t know – I just grabbed what I could.”

Levi nodded. “And why camp?”

Ruth sighed. “My mom made me. Needed to get away from me, I guess.”

“Are you going to come back next year?”

Ruth paused. “Are you?”

Neither of them answered, turning their attention back to cityscape before them.

Levi inhaled. “You know why I told you about my brother? You laid under the stars with me, like he used to.” Ruth inhaled, but he went on, “All I can keep thinking about is . . . I know this is dumb. . . but that passage from James — did you all study that? About suffering and doubt and being tossed by the wind and rain. I feel like that sometimes, and I guess my brother did, too.”

Ruth opened her mouth, wanting to say that she hated that passage from James. The first one Leah had read. It was so . . . wrong. Aren’t you supposed to doubt your dad after he leaves the first time? Aren’t low expectations better than false hope? What does faith do when you need help? She closed her mouth after a couple of seconds, the wind chaffing her lips.

They breathed for a while, watching the lights flicker and some go out. In and Out. Ruth felt a weird sense of intimacy creep up in her chest, staring out with Levi.

“Do you think it would feel like jumping off this prayer tower, into that light?”

“I don’t know, Levi. I hope so.”

“Yeah, I hope so, too.”

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