Page 25 of My Vows Are Sealed

“Okay, enough giving Darla a hard time,” Brendan chuckled as he moved just one of his arms. “We’re supposed to be cheering her up, not making her regret ever knowing us.”

I snorted as I grabbed my tomato-sauce-and-cheese-covered cardboard and took a bite. Yeah, maybe I was embarrassed right now, but even so, I didn’t think I could ever regret knowing any of these people. They’d refused to let me sit here and wallow in my misery, and they’d refused to let me push them away because I was trying to obey my father.

Brendan was right. People did need friends. And I’d found four amazing ones who had proven that they were here for me, no matter what.

Chapter 7

Brendan

Acoustic #3

“The Book of Proverbs tells us, ‘Do not hold back discipline from the child. Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die. You shall strike him with the rod and rescue his soul from Sheol,’” Pastor Jones said as he walked up to the pulpit on Sunday morning.

Those words were all I needed to wake up. My parents had decided to go to the early service this morning, so I was dragging, but hearing Darla’s father start preaching about disciplining children hadallof the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

“Children are born into sin,” he continued. “Weallare born into sin. And we all require discipline to ensure that we’re following in the path of the Lord. Children don’t knowhowto follow that path. It must be taught to them. It must beinstilledin them every moment of every day. Because thesecondyou take your eyes off of them, it’s their natural instinct to sin. Children will only seek pleasure. Gratification. They act on impulse, without thinking of the consequences. But the consequences aren’t only immediate. This is a matter of eternal life or eternal damnation!

“Imagine that you’ve turned on the stove to cook your dinner. Your child sees the coil that’s normally gray turning bright, glowing red. Their natural instinct is going to be to inspect this new, different thing. When they reach out to touch the burning stove, you have two options. You can use the rod of discipline and strike them before they damage themselves, or you can allow them to touch the stove and sear their flesh. Striking them might hurt them, but it won’t kill them. And it will prevent them from doing much greater harm to themselves by touching that burning stove.”

I heard various murmurs of “yes” and “amen” sounding around me, and I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t imagining this, because I literally could not believe what I was hearing. Was our pastor really standing up there and using his position as a leader to advocate hurting children?

I mean, the hot stove analogy was one thing. Hell, I’d actually smacked Nathan’s hand away from a hot burner at one point. But Pastor Jones kept repeating the word “strike,” and that scared me. Not for myself. Not even because he was telling an entire congregation of people that it was okay to hit their children.

No, hearing this scared me because I couldn’t help wondering what he was doing to his daughter that made him feel like he had to justify it with Scripture. I’d been worried about Darla foryears. I’d known for a long time that something wasn’t right. I’d seen the way she physically shrank away from her father whenever he was in the same room. I’d felt her flinch in my arms when he yelled at her. Just this week, I’d heard about him forbidding her from talking to anyone at church or school, and she was so scared of the consequences of him finding out she’d disobeyed him that she’d barely said two words to any of our group of friends since Thursday. None of us had given up on her, and we’d all made sure that she knew we weren’t going anywhere, no matter what. But the fact that she wasthatafraid of further discipline if she said a word wasn’t okay. It wasn’t normal.

I stole a glance at the front of the church, where the girl in question was sitting silently with her mother. Her eyes were wide, like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing any more than I could, and I could have sworn I saw fear flashing across her face too. The same fear I’d seen from her a thousand times.

And Miss Gloria? I didn’t knowhowto describe the expression I saw on her face. It was almost blank. Vacant. Numb. Like she wasn’t even really processing what she was hearing.

When had this happened? When had the loving mother figure I’d grown up knowing in my childhood, the woman who used to do crafts with me and Darla when we were kids and always had a plate of warm cookies and a glass of milk for me when I came over, turned into someone who just checked out while her husband stood up there trying to justify the way he treated their child? How did I miss it, and how didn’t I realize what it meant until now?

“Most people today say that it’s not okay to strike your child,” came the pastor’s voice, bringing me back to the message. “They call it abuse. But the Lord commands us to strictly discipline our children! If we spare the rod, we spoil the child! He commands us to train up a child in the way they should go so that when they are old, they will not depart from it! And children are commanded to honor their fathers and mothers, so that their days will be long on this Earth.

“So, what are you going to do? Are you going to let Satan lie to you in the form of the mainstream media, telling you that discipline is abuse, or are you going to do as the Lord commands and use the rod to keep your children on the path of righteousness?”

“That’s right!” I heard a random person exclaim.

“Amen!” someone else said.

What in the hell? How could anyone think this message was normal? How could they read the Bible’s instruction about disciplining children and take away a message that it was okay to strike your children and hurt them?

There were so many things wrong with this, I wasn’t even sure where to start. I knew one thing for sure, though: Darla was in serious trouble.

* * *

“Hey, Brendan,” Heather said as she walked up to me in the lobby.

“Hey,” I muttered, continuing to walk toward the youth room.

There was only one person I wanted to see and talk to this morning, and no offense to Heather, but it wasn’t her. It was a beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who I had a feeling desperately needed human contact after hearing her father try to justify what he was doing to her to an entire congregation of people who ate it up with a spoon.

For some reason, my arms literally ached with the need to give Darla a hug. She needed friends, now more than ever. But the problem was, every time I tried to show her that friendship, everything else I felt bubbled up to the surface, threatening to spill out and drown me.

“Um, am I the only one who thought that sermon was a little weird?” Heather said, just above a whisper, reminding me that she was still there.

I sighed. “Nope. It was more than a little weird.”

“Thank God my parents don’t take the Biblethatliterally,” she chuckled awkwardly. “I think they’ve maybe spanked meonce.”

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