Conviction by Kelly Loy Gilbert Page A

Maddie says, “Oops, that’s my cue.”
    I hope I didn’t actually make her feel worse—I think she was kidding, but it’s hard to know. She heads for the stage, and the rest of us sit down in the banged-up metal folding
chairs they line up for youth group Wednesday nights. Colin plops himself down next to me—his parents make him go to church, but I wouldn’t exactly say he’s a Christian—and
whispers, “Damn, Nessbaum’s really rocking the Jesus-wear. Think he’d let me borrow it?”
    I look. Jon’s sweatshirt has the green and yellow Subway logo, but when you look closer, the lettering reads his way. My dad wears crap like that, too—a shirt with a cross on it that
says THIS SHIRT IS ILLEGAL IN 41 COUNTRIES , a sweatshirt with a picture of a Bible that says LOST? ASK FOR DIRECTIONS . He
used to buy that kind of thing for me all the time, and even when I was too young to care about not looking like an idiot, I’d never wear them. I know people know I don’t drink or hook
up with girls, but I always thought marking yourself that obviously as a Christian felt like tempting fate, like if you did something wrong wearing clothing like that, it would be doubly bad.
Besides that, I’ve always kept what I believe to myself.
    But it’s hard not to wonder now if maybe I was the stupid one. If it’s like my dad used to say, that you have to take a stand for God if you expect him to take one for you, and all
this is happening because I didn’t prove my faith. But then I’ve been in my dad’s studio, and I think it’s easier to say whatever you want to into a void, into your
microphone and to all your invisible listeners, than it is to people your own age right in front of you. To Colin, I say, “Yeah, well, he could still probably get more than you.”
    “That was cold,” he whispers back. He hasn’t hooked up with anyone since he and Amye Morgan broke up over the summer. “Hit a guy where it hurts, why don’t
you.”
    “Not like anyone else is hitting—”
    Pastor Stan heaves himself up onto the stage, and we shut up then, although Colin flicks my thigh with his middle finger hard enough to sting and I do it back, harder, in return. Pastor
Stan’s not usually here on Wednesday nights because he’s with the adults instead. He scans through the rows of us, and then his eyes land on me and he smiles.
    “Braden,” he says, “would you come join us up here? We’d like to pray for you and your family before we get started.”
    I was afraid of something like this. I think of the stories I’ve heard all my life about what people said it was like for God to speak to them, how those stories are always about God
calling them to do the last thing they ever wanted to do and how they usually start with
I was praying
or
Someone was praying for me
. But there’s no actual way to tell someone
you don’t want to be prayed for, especially not when it’s your pastor, so I make my way up to the stage and hold still as he asks Kevin and the other youth leaders to come around and
lay their hands on me.
    “Father,” he says, still kind of out of breath from climbing onto the stage, “we know your Word tells us that we’ll be persecuted and despised for our belief in you. But
we also know you promise us that you’ll contend with those who contend against us. We know you promise to bring about justice for those who love you. So we ask to fight for your servant Mart
Raynor. We ask you to give him strength in this time of persecution. Be with him in this time.”
    All those hands feel like someone set a cockroach underneath my skin and now it’s scrabbling around. The lights on the stage force me under a microscope: God staring down at me with a
scalpel, ready to dissect. I’m grateful for that
Amen
, and I mumble a quick thanks and escape back to my seat. I feel wide open, like a wound. But then, as I’m trying to stitch
myself up again, trying to tell myself that I already know what God wants