Where were you, God, the night I screamed out for you?
You saw my heart race as my father’s voice downshifted. I knew from the sound of it what was coming, the way my chest had learned to know. I rushed to intervene to protect my mother and my family.
I watched in horror as my dad began to drive his head aggressively through the wall and felt the panic wash over me. This night was different and more dangerous than previous ones.
I had never screamed out for you to stop him before. I had never prayed out loud, and never like this. I was so embarrassed for my family to hear me, but I was so desperate for you to protect me that I pushed past it.
I was sure that this night, my father would kill my mother or one of us. I needed you to protect us, to protect me.
The damage that was done that night is still having ripple effects thirty years later.
How could you stay silent that night! You had the power to stop him! Are you not the defender of the weak and the broken!? You could have done any number of interventions to change what happened to me.
How do I move forward with you when you are silent? How can I ever believe that you really cared about me that night! What am I to do with the fear my body learned at nine? How my brain wired me for survival? I’m here at thirty-nine parenting that nine year old boy and caring about him.
How I still carry this wound into all of my relationships. How I can’t believe that anyone is truly safe. How this lack of trust shows up in a fight with my wife. How my fear of the world’s danger is projected onto smaller incidents with my children.
How do I see you as a good father when you saw the suffering that night?
I would never let my daughter go through what I went through! I would never intentionally let her suffer as she screamed my name out for help! Even being in the other room and wanting to act and not being able to help her would destroy me in a way emotionally that I’m not sure if I could recover from it.
The only way I think I could have gotten past that is if I was able to hold her after and begin to soothe the pain that she went through when I couldn’t be with her to protect her.
I needed someone to hold me after that night. Someone that I could trust would no longer harm me. Someone that would guarantee me that I would be safe and that I wouldn’t have to endure this type of suffering again. But that embrace never came.
I still need you to hold me. To allow my body to release this pain. To grieve what happened to me as a child. To mourn the childhood that was taken from me and the safety that never came from my biological father or from you.
Was I not important enough to you to protect? Did you not care enough about me to stop the pain I was going through? Was my prayer not done correctly? WHERE WERE YOU!?
You know how long I’ve carried this question in my body and how badly I want to release it but can’t.
Believing you are not a present and personal Father is emotionally safer for me than believing that you care about what’s best for me. If I allow myself to think you are a Father that truly cares about his creation and can intervene, I’m left holding a question that crushes my soul.
That nine year old made sense of that night by believing that you were absent or not real. I couldn’t carry the weight of the thought that you were capable of stopping my father, but chose not to. So as a nine year old, I decided you didn’t concern yourself with human affairs.
When I stepped away from you again after all of those years in the faith, it was because my pain began to mirror this reality I felt as a child. I could no longer keep asking why you felt so absent from me and why you still feel so absent in a way that felt safe to do.
My heart wants to believe you cared.
My heart wants to believe you were angry.
My heart wants to believe there was a reason you allowed the suffering. Not some pat answer that people give me to try and bypass my pain and the uncomfortable nature of what I went through. But a reason that actually allows me to believe you deeply cared about me still, even while you watched me go through that.
But I’m not sure there is a reason, and trying to force one can feel like I’m preventing that little boy from grieving.
My heart wants to believe you could be present with me.
That you chose to be physically present in Jesus. That you understand suffering in a way that can truly relate to what that abused nine year old boy felt.
My heart wants to believe that you want to connect with that boy so much that you intentionally entered into history in a shameful manner. Through a pregnancy that would be assumed to be illegitimate, being born in the most embarrassing of places, and connecting with humanity through being identified with the lowest in society.
I want to believe that is who you really are.
That you chose to suffer with your creation so that the lowest among it can see that you care and that you see us. That you identify with us. That we are important to you.
I still weep at the thought of you being like this.
I loved that there were moments after I first understood who Jesus was that I was able to take this into my body. That the beauty of this story had the power to begin to soothe that scared young boy.
But you know how quickly it came under attack. When I got back from church camp at fifteen, after tasting it for the first time, my mother shamed me for my newfound hope.
At seventeen, my body could only let in the safety of that story if I could be certain it wasn’t a lie. You know how afraid I was that it wasn’t real and what it would have done to my sense of meaning in the vulnerable state I was in, being a child that was passed from house to house.
I so badly needed to believe this that I became rigid and unable to hold it with nuance. You know I couldn’t sit and cry about the complexity of saying I’m unsure how to make sense of what happened to me.
I now have the emotional tools and resources to be able to mourn what happened to that little boy and I’m ready to tell you how you let me down.
But I’m also ready to address this wound with you again.
To grieve this little boy’s pain together. To invite you to sit with me in this pain and cry with me.
To allow myself to ask you to show me that you are here and that you were here all along.
I’m still scared that you aren’t there and that this is just me writing to heal that little boy’s need.
Maybe that is all this is. Me parenting that scared little boy.
Either way, I want this work to begin because this nine year old in me needs to believe he is safe now.
I’m ready.