One of the most searing wounds I have ever carried was not the personal and professional toll of standing up to corporate giants. It was not the hardships that followed when I chose to challenge a broken system by speaking Truth to Power. It was not the friends who faded when controversy arose, nor the slow erosion of my good name beneath a storm of lies. It was not even the quiet grief of lost expectations or the dimming of Love's promise.
No — what rests heaviest in my chest, what echoes in me still, is the moment my children were taken from me.
It happened in a place meant to embody refuge — a church, a sanctuary. While seeking a moment of solace with flesh of my flesh and blood of my blood, I was made to be a criminal when without warning, without explanation, and without legal authority or urgent cause, my 3 babies were taken from my side. They cried out. They resisted. And I… I stood still, overwhelmed, outnumbered, outmaneuvered, watching a moment unravel that I could not stop.
In an instant, decisions were made about me, for me, and around me — yet never with me. My heart dropped into the back of my chest and a familiar prayer rose from somewhere deep within: Lord, not again. Please Lord… not again.
My son's voice pierced the air as he reached for me — his protector, his safety — but I could not reach back. I was no longer seen as a father present with his children, but as a figure reshaped by silent assumptions, defined by a story I was never given the chance to address.
Behind the weight of that public moment, something sacred was broken. My infant — still learning the world through touch — was taken from the very arms that grounded her. My toddler, who knew me as strength and shelter, was left grasping for a presence that had never failed him before. And my daughter — old enough to feel confusion, yet too young to understand it — was left with questions time itself struggles to soothe.
There are moments in life that pass quietly but mark you forever. This was one of them. No tears fell from my eyes. No cry escaped my lips. But my soul — my soul cried out in a way that only God could hear; the cry of Abel's blood searching for the ears of a God that sees all. A cry of something sacred violated, silent anguish beckoning to a Just King.
Grief is not always loud. Sometimes it's quiet — like a thief in the night — robbing its victims of a long goodbye, because you didn't know that the last time would be the last time. That was the last time my heart felt safe because this Dad's heartbeat was comforted by their heartbeats. A man of many degrees, much learning, and deep thought — and still I did not know. I did not know the last embrace, the last shared breath, the last quiet glance would be the last. Tell me please, what man can predict that the last time will be the last time? What man can foresee the end before it arrives?
And I still ask — how does something like this happen in a place meant to house Mercy and Truth? When truth is replaced with assumption, when compassion yields to convenience, when people act without question because they think they know what they do not even understand — harm becomes inevitable.
My faith in God has not wavered. This is not a story of losing faith — it is a story of confronting the painful reality of human failure; the story of the arrogance of unchecked power hiding behind the moral authority of a pulpit; of people proclaiming to know a God of Love, but their trees bear the strangest of fruit. Yes, we all are infected with the same sin.
A part of my heart remains there — on the back pew of a church in Fridley, Minnesota — in a moment frozen in time. And the other part rests in the lives of three small hearts that still beat somewhere beyond my reach.
Not a day passes that I do not think of them.
And perhaps the hardest truth of all is that sometimes the deepest wounds are not inflicted in darkness, but in the places where we expected Light.
