The open-ended hours between Christmas and New Year's give Micah, 17, the chance to think about the role - if any - that desire is going to play in his life.
Religious boys... when no one asks you to explain yourself, you start to consider the possibility they never will.
Writer’s note
The story of a Gospel preaching event, teen competitors. With passion and intensity, the boys try and measure up to the challenge of a fire-and-brimstone style. But outside the greater purpose of the event, what is it like for the boys out on the road like this? The main character is in a city far from home, a place where he has stepped outside the world of the familiar. What conversations does he have with himself, or with anybody else?
A serious boy gets sidetracked by the draw of other boys - when he is supposed to be competing as a high school preacher. As talented a preacher as Micah is, he is sick of it. He finds more than he can handle when he chases something exciting on the Left Coast, something everybody back home will tell him is immoral.
Passage at Amazon High School Preachers
The beginning of the story…
I HATED what my parents were doing to me. They told me my future was set, that I was called to preach the Gospel. No two ways about it. And since I wasn't allowed to have my own opinion, then I would never tell them how I really felt. I didn't want the future they said was mine.
They said it was mine but I didn't recognize myself in it. What I really wanted to try out was what they said was immoral. Even though I didn't know exactly what that could be, I knew I would come up with something. There was a lot to choose from because in their world just about everything was immoral. Maybe I could just be who I was, which could turn out to be the greatest crime of all.
What was going on now was that I had come to the coast to win a preaching competition for high school boys, seniors. Maybe some of them were juniors, I didn't know for sure. I did know I had never lost one of these things. I also knew I didn’t care anymore.
Not far from the beach where I was standing, there were these railroad tracks. Two trains had come by in the span of about half an hour, one for freight and the other for passengers. It didn't make any difference to me who was on board. I just wanted to know they would be so far down the line in a day or two that if they thought about me at all they would forget who they thought I was.
I was actually a kid who wanted to be normal. I didn't want to be a kid with a calling, responsible for the serious business of people's souls. But you couldn't very well tell the truth of how you felt when you would be accused of turning your back on God.
The train tracks, cut in the side of a hill, were a good 20 feet higher than the beach. All you had to do was climb up there and hop a freight, or so I've heard. They even ran in winter, a fact I needed to know.
Christmas was over but New Year's hadn't come. I had never been to a New Year's Eve party, at least not the kind with alcohol. At home we celebrated things in prayer. I didn't know what they would do here.
Although I was very cold, I held my place on the beach. A light rain was stinging the sand, as if the sand could feel. It couldn't, of course, and neither could I.
Nothing seemed real in the wintertime. It seemed to me that the people responsible for the beach would be coming along any minute now to put it in the back of a truck. Summer was the true time of beachcombing, the time of finding unexpected things. There was nothing here for me, and no one around.
The building where they sold lemonade had padlocks on the doors and shutters. I didn't know if they really sold lemonade but I wanted to think they did. There were many things I wanted to believe but none of them would change the dark, the rain, or the competition I had come to win.