Trigger Warning: This reflection discusses grief, youth violence, childhood trauma, emotional neglect, and the long-term impact of silence within families and communities.
I thought I was just there to sing.
Instead, after my last song, I sat listening to a mother whose 19-year-old son had been killed less than five minutes from home. She described him as the good kid. The one who checked on his parents. The one who helped people. The one who stayed connected.
And somehow, despite all of that goodness, she now lives with the reality that she had to bury him.
What shook me even more was not just her pain, but her posture.
As she spoke about the young man responsible receiving a 46-year sentence, I heard both grief and forgiveness in her voice. Not weakness. Not denial. Just a heartbreaking understanding that tragedy had swallowed more than one life that night.
She spoke about childhood trauma. About children carrying pain nobody stops to address until it explodes into violence in the streets. And then she said something that settled heavily in my spirit. She talked about the dangerous things we normalize in our homes:
“Children are to be seen and not heard.”
“What happens in this house stays in this house.”
For generations, many of us were taught those sayings as discipline, respect, or family loyalty. But sometimes those same words teach children something else entirely:
Your feelings do not matter here.
Your pain is inconvenient here.
Your truth is unsafe here.
So children learn to survive by swallowing emotions they were never meant to carry alone. Fear gets buried. Anger gets buried. Shame gets buried. Hurt gets buried.
But buried pain does not disappear.
Eventually it leaks somewhere.
Sometimes it leaks into addiction.
Sometimes into rage.
Sometimes into depression.
Sometimes into violence.
Sometimes into emotional numbness.
Sometimes into streets filled with children trying to release emotions nobody allowed them to safely process at home.
As I listened to her speak, a familiar phrase rose in my spirit so strongly that I walked up and shared it with her afterward.
I told her, “I call it silent screaming.”
Because that is exactly what so many people are doing.
They are screaming internally while functioning externally.
Smiling.
Working.
Going to church.
Posting selfies.
Making jokes.
Serving others.
Showing up every Sunday while quietly unraveling inside.
And honestly, the church should be leading the effort to erase silent screaming.
Not by becoming a place where people perfect appearances, but by becoming safe enough for honesty again.
Too many people have mastered church behavior while still bleeding emotionally underneath the surface. We know how to shout over pain, dance over pain, quote Scripture over pain, and hide pain behind ministry titles.
But Jesus always stopped for what was underneath.
He noticed the overlooked.
He listened to the hurting.
He saw what everybody else missed.
And maybe that is part of our assignment too.
To hear people before they become headlines.
To create homes where children feel emotionally safe enough to speak.
To remind people that silence is not always strength.
Sometimes silence is survival.
And some children end up on the 6 o’clock news because nobody heard them when they whispered.
“There is a time to be silent and a time to speak.”
— Ecclesiastes 3:7
Love, Chelle
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