There were supposed to be six people in our family, but my oldest brother was almost never home. In my entire life, I only remember seeing him three times.
The first time, I remember a huge argument between him and my mother. I don't remember everything they said, but I remember the anger and hatred in his voice. He blamed her for breaking his leg with a bamboo pole when he was younger and spoke about the pain, the injury and the shame he had carried among his friends. After that, he left. My mother later told me that she had sent him to a home for troubled youths.
The second time I saw him, I was about seven years old and attending grade one. He was seventeen and had just returned from the home, and my mother allowed him to stay with us for a short while.
During that stay, he did something to me that I did not understand. I knew something felt wrong, but at seven, I did not know what it meant. My other brother, who was nine, knew something was happening too, but neither of us said anything. It became a secret between us.
A year later, we moved into a bigger house. My father also used the house as a gambling den.
One day, after finishing my homework, I was sitting in the living room watching cartoons. A few men I knew only as “uncles” were there, and two of them touched me in ways they should not have.
I remembered my mother telling me that I should never allow a man to touch certain parts of my body, so I moved away and rushed into the bedroom. The next day, I told her what had happened, and my father was informed.
Instead of protecting me, he became angry that I had spoken about it. Those men were his gambling guests. I was told to keep quiet, then punished and accused of lying, talking too much, even trying to attract their attention.
I was eight years old.
For a long time afterwards, part of me wondered whether I had somehow done something wrong simply by telling the truth.
When I reached grade six and learned more about the human body in school, I finally began to understand what my oldest brother had done years earlier. Eventually, I decided to tell my mother. She told my father, but he simply looked at me angrily and walked away. Nothing more was said about it.
The third and final time I saw my oldest brother, I was fifteen. He was twenty-five and had died tragically.
Over the years, I watched other members of my family suffer before they passed away too. My mother spent almost a year in a vegetative state, while my father was in a deep coma before his death.
Whenever I felt hurt or angry and could not understand why the people closest to me had treated me the way they did, I would remind myself that whatever we do, good or bad, there will eventually be consequences. For much of my life, I thought of this as karma. Perhaps it was simply one of the ways I learned to calm myself and make sense of things I could not understand.
I also kept reminding myself to be honest, to be kind and to do as much good as I could. For years, I believed this came entirely from my own strong will, my values and the choices I had made about the kind of person I wanted to be.
My understanding of God's protection has become different with time.
For many years, protection meant something very straightforward to me. If someone protected you, they stopped bad things from happening. By that definition, there were many times in my childhood when I was not protected. Painful things happened, and some of the people who should have kept me safe did not.
Faith has not changed those facts.
What I have begun to recognise instead is what all that pain did not take away from me.
It did not leave me spending my life wanting revenge. Somehow, I could still forgive, care about other people and feel deeply for their pain. Even towards people who had hurt me, compassion sometimes found its way back.
For a long time, I assumed that was simply the way I was made. Now I also see grace in it. Perhaps God's protection was not always about preventing everything that happened to me. Perhaps part of it was protecting something inside me from being completely consumed by what had happened.
That does not make the pain smaller or make any of it acceptable. Forgiveness does not require me to pretend something was right, and understanding that another person may have carried their own pain does not erase mine.
What it has given me is the freedom to leave judgement where I believe it belongs, with God, instead of continuing to carry it myself.
There are still questions from those years that will probably never have answers. I no longer feel the same need to find one for everything.
What matters to me now is that after all those years, I can still love, still care and still feel another person's pain without allowing my own past to decide who I must become.
Maybe that is the protection I could not recognise when I was younger. Not a life untouched by pain, but a heart that somehow survived it without becoming only pain.