What Faith Is

From an article in the Orlando Sentinel, an unimaginable story of faith …

After Dorothy Lewis was raped twice, shot between the eyes and robbed of the most precious things in her world — her daughters Jamilya, 7, and Jasmine, 3 — the widowed mom was certain that her life was over, too.

"That's what I said and what I believed," said Lewis, now 53, during an interview marking the 18th anniversary of the murders of her little girls in Eustis, one of Central Florida's most heinous and cruel crimes. "I could not see myself living past that day."

But she has.

"I want to encourage people to not give up, to just know there is hope in situations that seem hopeless," Lewis said inside New Directions Family Worship Center, a small church in Marion County where she and her husband, Hugh Frazier Brockington III, are co-pastors. "People say they don't believe in miracles, and I say, 'OK, you want to see a miracle? Just look at me.' "

As her physical wounds healed, she struggled with fear. She wouldn't venture outside the house alone. She had to make sure all the windows were locked and the blinds pulled. She attended a grief support group but found it depressing. She tortured herself with questions for months after the girls' funeral, asking herself what she could have done differently that would have saved them.

"I just decided that I couldn't do that anymore because 'what-iffing' wasn't going to change anything," she said. "I just accepted that my girls were gone. … I felt that I had to get better because God spared my life. God could have spared them — just like he saved me — he could have allowed them to live, but he didn't see fit to do that. I just had to accept that he wanted them more, and God is too wise to make a mistake."

She didn't say, 'Why me?' and do all the whining that some people do. She never lost her faith in God. Her issue was, 'OK, all this happened. Now what am I supposed to do with it, Lord?' " … and she became a school teacher, an answer to her prayer.

One more thing. Before the trial of the killer of her girls, she decided to forgive him. "Not to forgive, and holding in all that anger and hate, was just going to make me an angry, bitter person," she said. "You have to be able to forgive to be forgiven and to move on. In my mind, I had no choice."

There is not much I can do but wonder at her example. Most of us will never face the choices she did, but what faith is, is right there in her story. Even when life is at its very darkest, there is life still, grace still, hope still. May we remember that, when life goes dark for us … the sun and the Son will shine again.