I think I began to understand my faith in a very, very different way. I think before his death my faith was the thing that stopped things happening in my life, I could actually prevent certain incidents and certain things from happening to me, through praying, through being, feeling close to God, there were certain things that that I was immune from. I remember often being asked in my work where I used to work at the time, about the problems in the area that I lived in, and the problems with crime and gun, gun crime, and incidents that were happening, I was often challenged about these, “How do you feel living in, having your family live in an area like that?” And my response was always, “That would never happen to me. You know it would never happen to my family. It doesn’t happen to people, and families like mine. My family are not into drugs, we’re not gangsters. It doesn’t happen to us.” And I was very, very confident saying that, and I actually believed that there was something in my life that protected me from certain things happening, and that’s what I saw as my faith. So my faith was truly shaken through this experience because I realised that something that I was never expecting, or thought would never happen to me, actually did happen to me. So I don’t know, I don’t think it weakened my faith, I think it allowed me to see differently, because what my faith taught me was that I could overcome and handle this situation, and during the experience as deep and as dark and as dismal as sometimes it got, I never ever felt that I was alone in it. I felt that God was with me through it and my faith in him actually enabled me to realise that I was able to come through an experience that I never ever thought would ever happen to me.

So in many ways it deepened my faith in God but at the time it opened my understanding of my own faith, and made me see bigger, than I had ever seen it before. Though facing the reality of the fact that anything is possible, anything can happen to me, anything at any time.