The boy had troubles of his own.  He hated the school he had been attending for the past year.  He didn’t fit in, and as a small, nerdy-looking kid with glasses and a bookish manner, he was constantly picked on, especially on the bus ride to and from school.  Luckily, his was the first stop the bus made on the way from school, but this also meant he was the last kid picked up on the way to school.  Just finding a seat on the crowded bus in the morning proved problematic, and more often than not, he ended up next to other kids whose sole source of entertainment seemed to be making his life an absolute hell for the duration of the 10 minute ride to school.

To avoid this, the boy had taken to skipping school as often as he could away with it.  And on many days when he actually went to school, he would walk the 3 miles there and back though overgrown fields in order to avoid the inevitable torture.  Every night he worried about what would happen the next day, and the worry kept him awake until his body, worn out by the anxiety, would finally drift off to sleep long after midnight had come and gone.  This was how he learned about his father’s loss of faith.

The boy’s mom was in the hospital.  Nervous exhaustion was the diagnosis.  So who was his father talking to in muffled tones late at night on the phone?  It couldn’t have been her.  The room phones in the hospital weren’t even operational after 9:00pm.  Maybe it was a friend of his father, he thought.  Brother Bob or Brother Tommy.  Or maybe his father was talking to another minister, seeking his advice.  At first he was willing to believe the best, but as the conversations continued, his curiosity grew, until one night he slipped out of his bed, crept silently to the phone in the kitchen, and picked up the receiver.  It was a woman’s voice he heard, and it wasn’t his mother’s.

He stood in silence for a long time, shocked at what he heard.  He was unable to move until he heard the goodbyes.  These words finally released him from his frozen state, and the boy was able to carefully place the receiver back in place and go back to his bed.  What was father doing?  Well, it was obvious what he was doing.  His dad, a church pastor, was having an affair, even as his mom was at the hospital.  The weight of this revelation had barely begun to sink in upon him, when the boy saw a light, a flame, suddenly flicker through the curtain.  The sound of a match being struck accompanied it.  And soon the smell of cigarette smoke drifted into his room.

Now the boy knew for sure how far his father had fallen from grace, and in that moment he knew that the life he had been living was now over.