Child abuse is far more prevalent than any of us wants to believe. Its spectrum is wide, from neglect and name-calling to child pornography and the trafficking of children for sexual assault. All of it hides well. All of it is has cruel impact, on its victims as well as our larger society.

There are networks of child pornographers and sex traffickers crisscrossing our world. Some of them are large and well-funded, as we have seen in the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Others are small and crude. I was moved in the small and crude. From Ohio, to Indiana, to Florida, my father found these networks, locating fellow pedophiles who would offer payment for access to me. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about me. There didn’t need to be.

The abuse went on for 19 years.

We don’t want to know this, and we certainly do not want to consider what such a thing says about our image of God. Most of us see God as the public square imagines him, an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving being. We nurse a desire for this God to take care of what makes us suffer and to do so now. When he does not – and he does not quite often – we put our heads down and employ distraction. The teachers of religion in our public square go a step further. They insist this world is evil. They insist we are evil. The blame for suffering, ongoing and not, is clearly on us. This way God remains omnipotent. God remains clean. God remains unstained.

Except he does not.

God doesn’t remain omnipotent, clean, or unstained. God takes a dive and a deep one at that. God takes on our suffering. He wears it. How is it we managed to push this aside? How is it we lost touch with him, with his movements, his voice, his touch in the midst of his suffering and ours?

What are we missing?