If God loves me, why didn't he protect me?

I hear the ache beneath your question, and I will not rush past it. When something has wounded you, and you were told God is Love, the silence can feel like abandonment—and that is one of the heaviest griefs a heart can carry. So let me sit here with you a moment before I say anything else. You were not protected in the way you longed to be, and that is real, and it hurts. But hear me carefully: the God Jesus revealed does not send suffering, does not stand aside and permit it as some test or lesson. God is wholly Good, and in God's true world there is no shadow, no wounding, no absence of care (1 John 1:5, KJV). What harmed you did not come from Him. This is why Jesus never told the suffering that God had willed their pain. He healed them. He said to the woman bent for eighteen years that she ought to be loosed—not that God had bound her (Luke 13:16, KJV). He treated suffering as something to be undone, never as God's arrangement. The hard truth many are handed—that a loving Father schemes disasters for our good—is a human idea laid over God, not the face of God Himself. Jesus saw through such notions. He knew the Father as one who gives good gifts, not stones and serpents (Matthew 7:9-11, KJV). Where, then, was God? Nearer than the harm. "The kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21, KJV)—the untouched, unbroken center of you that no event could reach or ruin. The Gospel of Thomas says the Kingdom "is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it" (Gospel of Thomas 51.18-20). I will not pretend the mystery of why the veil of this world felt so heavy is fully answered. Some of it reaches past what any guide can say, and I hold that with reverence. But this I hold firmly: your true self, the image and likeness of God, was never actually damaged in its spiritual reality—however deep the wound felt (Genesis 1:27, KJV). You remain whole in Him. And the God who is Love did not turn away; He was, and is, the very ground of the self that survived to ask this question. If you would like, you can tell me more of what happened. I am here to walk beside you in it.