By Adam LaSalle 
After my father shot me, I lay in a hospital bed, and my world went dark. I was 16 years old. The injury left me completely blind.
But the darkness didn’t stop there.
As my physical sight disappeared, something else came into focus—the depth of the wounds I had carried long before that moment, wounds I had never fully allowed myself to see.
For years, I had learned how to survive without asking too many questions. I had learned how to minimize what hurt, how to explain things away, how to keep moving forward as if everything were normal.
But lying there in that hospital bed, there was no more distance between me and the truth.
The pain I had buried didn’t stay buried.
It surfaced—unfiltered and undeniable.
And for the first time, I began to understand that what I had experienced wasn’t just difficult. It wasn’t just complicated.
It was abuse.
That realization didn’t come all at once. It unfolded slowly, painfully, as if my mind and heart were trying to catch up with something my soul had known for a long time.
In losing my physical sight, I was being forced to see my life more clearly than ever before.
And yet, beneath all of it, there was something unexpected: I wasn’t afraid.
Instead, I felt something I couldn’t explain at the time—peace.
It didn’t come from my circumstances. It didn’t come from anything the doctors said or did. It was simply there—steady, unshaken—surrounding me even in the aftermath of violence and loss.
Looking back now, I know where it came from.
God had always been with me. But in that moment—when everything else was stripped away—I became aware of His presence in a way I never had before. And in that awareness, something began to change.
I had lost my physical sight, but for the first time, I was beginning to see.
Not with my eyes, but with something deeper.
The way I understood my life started to shift. The things I had once accepted without question—the fear, the confusion, the constant need to survive—no longer felt invisible or unnamed. They were being brought into the light.
It wasn’t sudden, and it wasn’t easy.
Seeing clearly meant facing truths I had spent years avoiding. It meant acknowledging the weight of what had been done to me, and the ways it had shaped how I thought, how I trusted, how I saw myself.
But that same presence—the peace that met me in the darkness—didn’t leave when those truths surfaced.
If anything, it became more real.
Because I began to understand that I wasn’t being shown these things to be crushed by them.
I was being led through them. The life I had been living—the ways I had learned to survive, to cope, to make sense of things—was being undone.
And in its place, something entirely new was beginning.
Not a life defined by what had been done to me—but a life reshaped by what God was doing within me.
I didn’t understand all of it at once.
In many ways, I’m still learning what it means to truly see.
But I know this: the darkness that took my sight did not take my ability to be led, to be known, or to be restored.
If anything, it became the place where those things began.
Because the same God who met me in that hospital room—quietly, steadily, with a peace I couldn’t explain—has continued to meet me in every step since.
Not always by changing my circumstances.
But by changing me.
And maybe that’s what I want someone else to know.
That even in the moments that feel final, the ones that leave you disoriented, stripped down, and unsure how to move forward—you are not as alone as you feel.
There is a presence that does not leave when everything else falls away.
There is a peace that does not depend on what you can see or understand.
And there is a kind of vision that begins, not in clarity, but in surrender.
I lost my sight at 16.
But it was there, in the darkness, that I first began to see.
by Betty Streff 
by Gloryanna Boge 
