By E.T. Williams
My childhood wasn’t broken. It was a warzone.Pain wasn’t a visitor—it was the landlord, demanding rent in blood and terror. As a Black boy in the South, I wasn’t just told I was trash. I was treated like it: a receptacle for rage, a moving target for hatred. My existence felt like a crime.
Violence carved bone-deep.I wasn’t just wounded—I was formed in fire.
🏚️ The Origin: My Beginning Was a Battlefield“You ain’t nothin’ but the child of a no good rapist.”The words slammed into me long before I understood their meaning—a poison seeping into my marrow. My existence weaponized before I could walk. A stain etched into my skin. Product of rage. Accident of violence. The first lie I swallowed: I was born a burden.
🌲 The Hunt: Prey in sunset. At seven, the woods became a slaughterhouse.Crack! BB pellets split bark inches from my skull as I ran—thorns shredding clothes, lungs scorched with every gasp. A predator’s laughter chased me. Fear tasted like blood and pennies. Branches whipped my face as I stumbled, already understanding: To him, I was just moving target practice.
💥 The Break: Home Was a War Front. Then came the day where she picked up a fraternity paddle and swung it violently as hammer. Roar. Slam. SNAP.My arm bent like rotten wood. White agony detonated—world tilting as I gagged, cradling the mangled limb. Her silence afterward was colder than the pavement where I curled. No apologies. No tears. Just another Tuesday. A boy in a corner, learning: Love rarely heals what fury breaks.
📚 The Words: When School Was a Cage.
“Stupid animal,” the teacher hissed.Acid breath stung my cheeks as classmates snickered. Each syllable flayed me alive at my desk. I folded inward—shoulders hunched, eyes nailed to the floor. Vanishing was my only armor.
These memories don’t stand alone—just fire-scars in a constellation of pain. Countless others blur past: purpling bruises on breakfast lines, an uncle’s razor-sharp taunts during Sunday dinners, prayers whispered into indifferent darkness. But their purpose isn’t to wallow. They’re borders on the map to the miracle.
Because deeper than every wound?Lurked a glitch.
The good moments? Obliterated.Try smelling carnival popcorn when phantom blood floods your nostrils. Try hearing laughter when your own choked sobs still vibrate in your skull.
Then—The Glitch.
In that suffocating darkness, sparks erupted. Grace glitches. Catastrophic system failures in suffering’s code. Moments where blinding kindness detonated through despair.
My salvation glitch: my godparents—adopted parents.Imagine drowning in “Ugly! Worthless! Nothing!” and being hauled onto a fortress of pure, fierce acceptance. Their love wasn’t soft—it was armor. For a shattered boy flinching at shadows? Impossible. Miraculous.
They were elderly. Jewish. Holocaust survivors.Their pain wasn’t history—it lived in their posture. Eyes holding galaxies of witnessed horror.
The Key? They Knew Suffering.
Not theoretically—viscerally. They recognized the hunted animal in my eyes because they’d worn that skin. They didn’t offer pity—they offered recognition. They became my bomb shelter.
The Raw Truth About Grace Glitches:
They aren’t crutches. They’re divine lightning strikes. Portals blasted open by God to flood relentless love into places hope abandoned. Proof the system can be shattered.
My adopted parents were devoutly Jewish. Synagogue. Shabbat candles. Passover Seders. They didn’t accept Jesus as Messiah. Yet I knew they loved the God of Abraham. And He used them—shockingly—to love me.
Their love was battlefield triage for a Black kid who flinched at eye contact. Their compassion was the tourniquet for my hemorrhaging self-hatred. Through them, I glimpsed a love louder than brutality. A love that roared:
“YOU ARE WORTHY.”
Their grace glitch ignited my stumble toward Something Greater.
This Is the Gospel in Raw Action:
Not stained-glass serenity—but radical, interrupting, dangerous love.The Spirit-led life? Divine GPS attunement. Tuning our hearts so God deploys us into bloody crossroads of human anguish. To be His witnesses. His love made flesh. His grace glitch crashing another’s nightmare.
The Tectonic Shift:
• Unconditional love is a gift.
• Love from those your soul recoils from—or society calls your enemy? That vaporizes hell-forged chains.
Your Mission (Forged in My Pain. Fueled by Their Love):
WHO IS THE SPIRIT COMMANDING YOU TO BE A GRACE GLITCH FOR?
Whose warzone must you invade? Who needs your detonation of God’s system-obliterating love?
• The child flinching at raised voices?
• The person curled in a doorway like refuse?
• The one trapped in exploitation’s cycle?
• The powerful figure radiating warehouse-sized loneliness?
• The educator drowning in cynicism?
• The shepherd buckling under the flock’s weight?
GO. BE THE GLITCH.
Sabotage their narrative of isolation. Tell them:
“YOU ARE NOT ALONE IN THIS TRENCH.”“THIS DARKNESS WON’T CLAIM YOU FOREVER.”“DROP THE ARMOR. YOUR BROKEN SELF IS SAFE HERE.”
Go with the authority of a blood-bought child of God. Armed not with platitudes—but with explosive grace.
This Isn’t Comfort. It’s Frontline Deployment.
Yielding to the Spirit to become God’s hands in a world hostile to light. Crashing systems of suffering with love’s shockwave.
My Holocaust-surviving parents were that detonation for me.
NOW—LOOK.Who waits, shell-shocked, for your glitch in their matrix of pain? The enemy banks on their despair going unchallenged.
Be the error code scrawled in love’s defiant light.Be the explosion of grace.BE THE GLITCH.
The Grace Glitch 