Untapped

Pop, pop, pop, pop! The sound that would change my life forever…

It was a warm early fall night in September of 1996 when the phone rang around 7pm. It was my mother, she said, “Baby I need to tell you something.” The words that followed devastated my life…”Andre is dead”. My mind could not process what she was telling me, I had just dropped my son off for a visit with her a few hours ago. How could he be dead? He was vibrant and full of life, just turned 18 years old a few days earlier and looking forward to graduation. Dead? The phone fell out of my hand and I slid to the floor in anguish. What was happening? This was a mistake. We put his 17month old brother in the car and raced to my mother’s house. My heart began to sink as we approached her street, it was filled with people screaming and crying and I knew it was true. My son was dead. I jumped from the car before it could even stop and my mother and brother ran to meet me and I held on for dear life…that’s when I felt it. The life began to leave my being, everything in me poured out onto the street like the blood of my son. Distraught, my mother took up the gruesome task of identifying his body that was lying there covered, surrounded by police. It was true, it was him. Why? What happened to my baby?

He had gone to the store two blocks away from my mother’s home with a friend. In front of my mother’s house, they were stopped by two men and an argument with the other guy ensued. The man pulled out a gun and shot Andre’s friend. Andre began to run and they chased my son down and shot him four times in the back. He laid dying in the alley behind my mother’s house and no one knew it. The police were called for the boy laying visibly on the ground and then a neighbor noticed something from his back window. “I think there is someone on the ground behind my house.” The police went to investigate and neighbors saw that it was my son. They brought his body from the alley and told the news to my family. They didn’t know what to do, how were they going to tell me the love of my life was gone? My phone rang.

In the days that followed, I sank deeper and deeper into despair. Family tried to console me. Friends were by my side continually but nothing could ease the pain of this kind of loss. I was slipping away. The men and women of God prayed constantly for me to have strength and frankly, I was too young in my relationship with the Lord to know what they meant. How could anyone have “strength” when their baby was lying dead in the street?! I was a complete and utter mess, heartbroken in ways I never conceived possible. Shattered. Angry. Passively Suicidal. My story is like many ripped from the headlines today. A shared experience with other mothers and fathers whose children have been ripped from their arms by violence. Like many others, I was plunged into the abyss of hatred, rage and pain, with what was left of my heart crying out for revenge. Revenge for the life of my son. I thought about it constantly, how I would kill the person who stole my love from me. This changed me. Would I ever be the same, would I ever wake up from this nightmare? In that place, is where my journey into understanding the strength of God began – come with me as I share what I have discovered…