Crossword

I do not remember a time in my childhood when I felt safe. My earliest memories are not of birthday parties or playgrounds or warm kitchens. They are of shadows. The sound of footsteps in the hallway. The feeling of hiding under beds, behind doors, inside closets, trying to make myself invisible. I learned very young that danger could walk on two feet, smile at neighbors, attend church on Sundays, and still turn into something terrifying when the front door closed. I grew up in a small midwestern town that prided itself on being wholesome, traditional, and close-knit. But behind our peeling white fence stood a house filled with secrets. My mother struggled with addiction, vanishing for days only to return with excuses I stopped believing. My father was the angrier one — unpredictable, volatile, capable of turning a spilled drink into an explosion of rage. Some children learn their numbers by playing with blocks. I learned mine by calculating risk: How many drinks would it take tonight? How many minutes until his temper snapped? How many hours would she be gone this time? By the time I was seven, the fighting had grown so constant that silence became my comfort. I learned to disappear into myself — quiet, obedient, ghostlike. But the danger didn’t end with the shouting or the hitting. It grew into something darker, something I didn't even have words for back then. My father owed debts, the kind that didn’t get paid with money alone. People came and went from our house at strange hours. At first I was told to stay upstairs, but eventually, staying upstairs was no longer an option. I was paraded out like something to be traded. Negotiated. Sold. I was a child, and I was trafficked by the people who were supposed to protect me. I did not understand what was happening — not fully. I only knew that parts of me were being taken that should have never belonged to anyone else. I knew my tears made no difference. I knew screaming brought punishment. I knew compliance meant survival. I knew that what happened in our house was something other families would never believe. And so I became two versions of myself: the silent one, moving through school in a fog, and the terrified one who lived in that house at night. My teachers described me as “bright but withdrawn.” I always turned in my homework but never made eye contact. I never invited friends home. I lied — constantly. “Everything’s fine.” “I’m fine.” “It was an accident.” “I fell.” “I’m just tired.” “I just get bruises easily.” No one pressed further. When I was nine, my mother disappeared completely. I don’t know if she left to spare herself or because the darkness finally swallowed her whole. But she never came back. I remember standing at the window, night after night, waiting for her headlights to turn into the driveway. I waited for years. A part of me is probably still waiting. After she left, things got worse, not better. My father drank more, raged more, brought home more people who treated me like an object. But in the midst of the trauma, I developed something unexpected: a fierce, burning desire to survive. I clung to life with a stubbornness I didn’t know I had. Some nights I would whisper to myself, “This won’t be forever. You won’t be here forever.” Sometimes I believed it. Sometimes I didn’t. But saying it kept me alive long enough to see the day everything changed. I was twelve the night the police raided our house. To this day, I don’t know who tipped them off. A neighbor? A concerned teacher? Someone who saw something they couldn’t ignore? All I know is that I woke to shouting — but not the usual kind. Flashlights cut through the darkness. Men in uniforms pulled open doors, shouting commands. My father tried to run but didn’t get far. They handcuffed him on the floor of our living room. When one of the officers found me in the upstairs bedroom, I flinched, expecting the worst. But instead of yelling, he lowered his voice. He knelt down. He said, “You’re safe now.” Safe. I didn’t know what that word meant. The weeks that followed were a blur of hospital lights, social workers, detectives, interviews, courtrooms, and foster homes. I was placed in emergency care with a woman named Linda, whose kindness felt almost suspicious. She made me dinner, folded my laundry, spoke to me softly, and kept the hallway light on all night without being asked. She didn’t ask for details of my past — she only reminded me constantly, “Whatever happened is not your fault.” I didn’t believe her, but I wanted to. Therapists would talk about trauma bonding, hypervigilance, dissociation, all the psychological fallout that became my everyday reality. But at twelve years old, all I knew was that I was terrified of everything. I jumped at sudden movements. I panicked when doors closed. I froze when people raised their voices. Even kindness made me suspicious. Love felt like a trap. Safety felt temporary. And God? God felt like a cruel joke. I had been taken to church as a child. I had heard verses about God’s protection, His love for children, His justice. But none of those words matched what had happened to me. If God loved me, why didn’t He stop it? If He protected children, why didn’t He protect me? I rejected Him long before I understood who He really was. By the time I reached high school, I was functioning but fractured. I kept my trauma hidden, tucked behind straight A’s and polite smiles. People told me I was “remarkably resilient.” They had no idea that I cried myself to sleep almost every night, or that I kept a suitcase packed under my bed in case I had to run again. I trusted no one. I built walls around my heart so high and so thick that even I couldn’t see over them. At sixteen, I aged out of Linda’s home and moved into a transitional living program for older teens. It was supposed to prepare me for adulthood. Instead, it plunged me into loneliness I wasn’t ready for. I worked part-time retails jobs, took community college classes at night, and tried desperately to appear normal. But inside I was a storm — angry, afraid, numb, all at once. It was around this time that I developed a self-destructive pattern of choosing relationships with men who replicated the chaos of my childhood. If someone treated me poorly, I felt strangely familiar with it. If someone treated me well, I didn’t know how to respond. I sabotaged relationships before they could fall apart on their own. I pushed away anyone who cared too much. Pain was my native language; affection was foreign. But God was not done with me. The turning point came in the most unexpected way. I was twenty-one, working at a small coffee shop, when a woman named Rachel started coming in regularly. She always sat in the same corner booth with a Bible and a notebook full of colored pens. She smiled easily, tipped generously, and asked people their names. I avoided her at first — I avoided everyone — but Rachel had a gentle persistence that confused me. She wasn’t pushy, just present. One slow afternoon, she asked if I needed prayer. I laughed — out loud, harshly. “If you knew anything about my life,” I snapped, “you wouldn’t ask that.” Rachel didn’t flinch. She just nodded and said, “Then it sounds like you’ve carried things alone for a very long time.” That sentence broke something in me. Over the next few months, we talked often — about life, pain, fear, and eventually about God. Rachel never pressured me. She never dismissed what I had been through. She didn’t offer quick answers or shallow Christian clichés. She simply kept showing up, week after week, reminding me that God had not abandoned me. One day she said, “You survived because God never let go of you. Even when you couldn’t see Him, He saw you.” It took a long time — therapy, counseling, tears I had buried for years — but eventually, something inside me began to soften. For the first time since childhood, I considered the possibility that love could be real. That healing could be possible. That God could redeem even the most shattered story. I surrendered my life to Christ on a cold January evening, sitting on Rachel’s living room floor while she prayed beside me. I cried with a force that left me trembling — over my past, my fear, my brokenness, and also over the overwhelming realization that God had never abandoned me, not even in the darkest moments. My healing didn’t happen overnight. Trauma recovery is not linear. I had flashbacks, nightmares, seasons of depression, moments when I questioned whether healing was even possible. But slowly — steadily — God rebuilt what had been destroyed. He taught me what love feels like, what safety feels like, what trust feels like. He taught me that forgiveness is not excusing evil but releasing its grip on my soul. He taught me that my identity is not my trauma, not my past, not what was done to me — but who He created me to be. Today, I am thirty-two years old. I work with a nonprofit that advocates for survivors of childhood abuse and trafficking. I speak at churches, schools, and local agencies about the warning signs that were missed in my own childhood. I mentor young women who remind me painfully of myself at their age. I tell them the truth that saved my life: “You are not ruined. You are not alone. You are not beyond God’s ability to restore.” I am still healing. I will always be healing. But I am no longer defined by what happened to me. I am defined by the God who rescued me, redeemed me, and called me His own. There are still days when shadows feel too close, when memories surface without warning, when my heart tenses the way it used to. But now I know what to do with the fear — I bring it to the One who carried me through the fire. The One who wept with me as a child. The One who broke the chains that held me captive. The One who writes beauty out of brokenness. My name is Sarah. I was abused. I was trafficked. I was abandoned. I was wounded. But I was also seen. I was rescued. I was loved. I was redeemed. And today — because of Jesus Christ — I am free.