Holding My Family’s Pain in My Hands

The hours after the truth came out moved differently—slow and heavy, as if time itself had forgotten how to breathe. Our home, normally loud with movement and conversation, felt muted. Even the air felt different. Thick. Unsettled. Like sound might break it.

My daughter was home, but not really. She was sitting on the couch in the living room, wrapped in a blanket even though the house wasn’t cold. Her eyes drifted—not avoiding us, but not meeting us either. She looked disoriented, caught between exhaustion and a deeper kind of numbness. It was as if waking her the night before had pulled her out of sleep but not out of whatever world she’d been living in to survive.

My other children hovered in doorways and hallways, waiting for us to tell them what was happening. They didn’t know the details—just that something had happened, something serious enough that their mother had cried in a way they hadn’t seen since they were small. They looked at me like I had answers. Like I could make sense of what made no sense at all.

I gathered them together and did my best to explain. Not the whole story—not yet. There are wounds that need tending before they can be named. But I told them their sister had been deeply hurt, that something terrible had been revealed, and that we needed to love her, protect her, and be patient with the days to come.

Their reactions were all over the spectrum.

One stared in disbelief.

One cried immediately.

One went still, quiet, absorbing everything without reaction.

One walked over and hugged their sister without waiting for permission.

And the wounded… she just sat there, eyes down, fingers clenched inside the blanket. She wasn’t rejecting us—she just didn’t know how to receive anything yet.

Looking at her broke something inside of me.

A father is supposed to protect his child.

A father is supposed to know.

A father is supposed to see danger before it arrives.

Instead, I found myself holding a pain I had not prevented and did not understand.

It felt like trying to carry water in my hands—everything slipping through my fingers faster than I could hold it.

I kept replaying the signs:

the late nights,

the trembling voice at 4 AM,

the cold car in the empty lot,

the excuses that never felt quite right,

the emotional distance I had tried to bridge with truth and discipline.

I had interpreted rebellion.

But what I had seen was trauma wearing the only mask it had.

Confusion and guilt settled into my chest—guilt for not knowing, not seeing, not understanding. A guilt that wasn’t rational but was real. The kind that whispers, You should have protected her, even when you know you couldn’t have known.

My wife moved through the house like someone carrying too much fragile glass in her hands—careful, slow, every step heavy. Every time she looked at our daughter, her eyes filled again.

We tried to talk to her gently—ask small questions, reassure her she was safe, ask if she needed anything. But she answered with single words, sometimes nods. Her body was home, but her heart was somewhere deeper, somewhere she had learned to hide long ago.

We didn’t push.

Wounds don’t open on command.

The day after the revelation, I called my friend Alex. I didn’t know what I needed—just that I couldn’t carry the weight alone. We met at a nearby park in the morning.

The moment I tried to speak, the words collapsed. My voice gave out before my grief did. I had held myself together through the night, through the explanations, through the gathering of my family—but when I tried to tell him, it was like a dam broke. He put his arms around me, and I wept in a way I hadn’t wept in years.

It wasn’t just grief for my daughter.

It was grief for the years she carried this alone.

Grief for the innocence stolen.

Grief for the trust broken by someone we loved.

Grief for the father I had wanted to be and the father I felt I had failed to be.

But beneath all the emotion, there was another ache—a spiritual one.

Not a crisis of belief.

A crisis inside belief.

I didn’t doubt God, but I couldn’t understand Him. I knew He had been with my daughter in every moment of her suffering—Scripture told me that—but knowing that brought its own kind of pain. I believed He is sovereign, but sovereignty is a hard doctrine to swallow when you’re holding the wounded pieces of your child’s life.

As the day stretched on, the house remained strangely quiet. People walked softer. Voices dropped to whispers. Even laughter, when it came at all, sounded like it was borrowed.

Every so often, I would look at Priscilla and see the little girl she once was—bright, joyful, trusting—and feel something twist inside me. I wanted to take her pain, to pull it out of her body and carry it myself. But trauma isn’t transferable. It stays where it was planted, deep in the soil of memory.

All we could do was be present.

Sit with her.

Sit with each other.

Sit with a grief too large for words.

That first day, that first night… we didn’t heal.

We didn’t process.

We didn’t understand.

We simply held the pain—awkwardly, imperfectly, desperately—hoping that if we kept holding it long enough, maybe we wouldn’t break.

But the truth was already clear:

We were broken.

All of us.

Together and individually.

And though we couldn’t see it then, the path ahead would stretch far into the future—through anger, confusion, therapy, prayer, setback, faith, silence, and a kind of strength none of us wanted to learn.

For now, we were just a family sitting in the wreckage, breathing the same air, sharing the same sorrow, waiting for the next step we didn’t yet know how to take.

Faith in the Dark is Jesse Velez’s true story of enduring faith, costly obedience, and discovering God’s presence in seasons of grief and silence. Best to read the 12-Part Series in order: