Introduction

Some of my earliest memories are of church.

I grew up in a Pentecostal household where church wasn’t reserved for Sunday mornings. We were there six days a week. There were Sunday services, weeknight services, prayer meetings, Bible studies and revivals. Church wasn’t simply somewhere we went.

It was part of who we were.

And for a long time, I loved it.

I loved the music. I loved worship. I loved knowing the Bible stories and learning Scripture. I loved the feeling that there was something bigger than all of us and that God was watching over me.

As a little girl, my faith wasn’t complicated.

God was good.

God loved me.

God heard my prayers.

And when something frightened me, I believed I could turn to Him.

Psalm 18:2 became especially important to me.

The Lord is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer.

Those words made sense to a child. A rock was something that didn’t move. A fortress was somewhere you could hide when you were afraid. And a deliverer was someone who came when you needed to be rescued.

I had no reason to question any of that.

Not yet.

There was another part of my childhood that I loved just as deeply: my family.

And there was one person in particular who held a very special place in my heart.

He was my favorite person in the world.

He had a nickname for me that nobody else used. We had secret handshakes and little jokes. He made me feel noticed and important. When I was around him, I felt special.

I trusted him completely.

Then, when I was eight years old, that relationship changed.

I didn’t understand it at first.

I didn’t have words for what was happening, and I certainly didn’t understand the things an adult understands when looking back at those moments.

I was just a little girl who loved someone and trusted him.

And I was a little girl who loved God.

For the next eight years, those two loves would become tangled with fear, confusion, secrecy and pain in ways I could never have understood at eight years old.

I continued going to church.

I continued listening to sermons.

I continued praying.

And I continued carrying a secret nobody knew about.

There were times during the abuse when the prayers and Scriptures I had learned in church were the only things I knew to reach for.

I prayed for the person hurting me.

I asked God to forgive him.

I recited the Lord’s Prayer in my head.

And I returned again and again to Psalm 18:2.

My rock.

My fortress.

My deliverer.

For years, I held onto those words.

But as I grew older, they became harder for me to understand.

Questions began replacing the certainty I once had.

If God was my protector, why wasn’t I protected?

If He heard my prayers, why did this keep happening?

If He was my deliverer, when was deliverance coming?

Those questions didn’t turn into anger overnight.

Faith didn’t disappear from me in a single moment.

Something simply began to change.

By the time I was eighteen, the little girl who had once trusted God so completely had become a young woman carrying years of pain and questions she couldn’t answer.

Eventually, those questions became anger.

And that anger became something even harder for me to admit.

I hated God.

Not because I had suddenly decided He wasn’t real.

I hated Him because I had spent my childhood believing He was real.

I believed He had seen me.

I believed He had heard me.

And I couldn’t understand why He hadn’t come to save me.

So at eighteen years old, I walked away from the church that had been my entire world.

Two years later, the family member who had abused me died.

I was twenty.

Whatever questions I might someday have asked him died with him.

There would be no conversation years later. No opportunity to ask why. No chance to hear him acknowledge what happened. No apology. No moment where I could finally tell him what those years had done to me.

He was gone.

The secret wasn’t.

I carried it for more than forty years.

This book is about those years, but it is also about everything that came with them.

It is about a little girl who loved church.

A little girl who trusted someone she shouldn’t have had to fear.

A young woman who became angry with the God she had once trusted completely.

A secret that followed me into adulthood.

A loss that eventually brought God back into my life.

And questions that didn’t disappear simply because I returned to church.

I wish I could tell this story as a straight line from hurt to healing, with every question answered along the way.

That isn’t my story.

There are still things I don’t understand.

There are conversations I will never get to have.

There are memories attached to prayers and Bible verses that I am still learning how to carry differently.

And there is a little girl inside this story who deserves, after more than forty years of silence, to finally be heard.

For most of my life, I protected the secret.

Now I am ready to tell the story.