I used to pray at night. Whispered prayers, quiet enough that no one would hear, careful enough that no one would know I still believed. Because belief was dangerous. Hope was dangerous. Hope could get you hurt.
I asked God to stop the bad things from happening. I asked Him to change the world, or at least my small corner of it. But the world did not change. The bad things did not stop.
For a long time, I thought that meant He wasn’t there. That He had turned His face away, or worse, that He was watching and choosing to do nothing. There is a certain kind of pain that comes with that thought, the realization that no one is coming to save you. The realization that maybe you were always alone.
But I wasn’t. I see that now, looking back.
Because somehow, I survived.
Somehow, I found ways to keep going. Somehow, there was always just enough—just enough strength to get through another night, just enough kindness from a stranger, just enough time before the worst thing happened. I used to think those things were luck. I used to think they were accidents. But I don’t anymore.
Because God was there, even then. Not in the grand gestures, not in the sweeping miracles, but in the small mercies. The ones that didn’t stop the pain but made survival possible. The ones that kept me alive when I should have disappeared.
I don’t pretend to have answers. I don’t know why God lets children suffer, why innocence is not enough to be spared. I don’t know why He doesn’t stop the hands that hurt, why He lets darkness crawl into places where light should be. These are the questions that never leave, the ones that sit with you even after the wounds have closed.
But I do know this: I was not abandoned.
I made it out, and maybe that was the answer to my prayers all along. Maybe God was never the absence of suffering but the thread that pulled me through it. Maybe survival itself was the miracle.
B 🤍
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