MARYVILLE, Ill. (ABP) — March 8, 2009, started out as a fairly normal Sunday for Cindy Winters. Her husband, Fred, got up early to preach the 8:15 a.m. service at First Baptist Church in Maryville, Ill. One of their daughters rode with her father because she was working in the nursery that morning. Cindy and their other daughter came later. Then the nightmare began.
As she neared the church where her husband had ministered for 22 years, the entrance was blocked by emergency vehicles. A man directing traffic told her to pull off the road, and her cell phone rang. It was a friend from another part of the state who told her everything was going to be OK. Then another call, from a church member: "Cindy, what's going on?" She encountered a couple, and the woman remarked, "She doesn't know." Finally, she asked a man she knew well what happened. He sighed deeply and told her, "Fred's been shot."
Even after hearing how serious her husband's injuries were, she assumed he was going to be OK until she was allowed to see him in a hospital emergency room. As she entered a nurse told her they had just declared him dead.
"The only thing I really know to compare that kind of panic and sense of helplessness to is it's sort of like being in a haunted house where you just are terrified and you can't find an exit sign or the nightmare you just can't wake up from," Winters said at a March 7 church service marking the one-year anniversary of the slaying. "I had never been so afraid in my entire life."
After being directed to a room for families, Winters described being overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness, panic and thinking that the one person she needed the most at that time couldn't be there.
After a while, she said, there came a point when God spoke to her. "God said, 'Cindy, what happened here was sheer evil, and it was orchestrated by Satan.' And I said out loud — and I could have very well sounded pretty crazy to whoever was in that room at the time — but I said out loud, 'Then Satan will not win.'" She described the moment as a building block to help put her life back together.
It was hard telling her children their father wasn't coming home, she said, and surreal to see people she knew at a press conference and her own family pictured on CNN.
The first real comfort came that night, when she and the girls crawled into bed and read two chapters from 90 Minutes in Heaven, a book that had so moved her husband when he read it two years earlier that he scheduled author Don Piper to give his testimony about his own near-death experience and vision of heaven at First Baptist Church the following April 26.
"Focusing on heaven doesn't take away our pain for the here and now, but it sure does put things in proper perspective," she said.
As a new widow and the mother of two fatherless children, Winters said she realized several things very quickly in the days that followed March 8.
"First of all, life can end for any of us without warning," she said. "None of us are guaranteed tomorrow, or even the rest of today. No matter how long of a life we are blessed with, each of us will one day die and have to face our eternal destination."
"I also became vividly aware that our circumstances in life can change drastically and without any kind of warning," she said. "Even though my circumstances changed, the God that I know did not change. In my profound darkness I still felt his goodness and his love, and I saw his faithfulness. I went to the pit. God was in that pit. He was right there in that pit with me."
"There is hope in chaos," she continued. "There is peace in the middle of the storm, and there is joy in spite of our circumstances. I was always taught this, and I did believe it, but now I know it."
Winters said she had had trials before that tested her faith, but nothing compared to the murder of her husband and what she has had to endure since them. "When my life storm came, and it was my tragedy that made the headlines, I had to determine one thing," she said. "Was knowing Jesus enough? It is. It is."
"The strength that I draw on doesn't come from religion," Winters said. "It doesn't come from believing a set of facts about God. It doesn't come from doing good things. It comes simply from having an intimate, trusting relationship with God's Son, Jesus Christ. That's what faith is. It's trust. It's trusting him when life doesn't seem fair, when nothing is going right. It's trusting him when your world is seemingly falling apart."
"A relationship with Jesus is the one thing that makes sense when nothing else does," she said.
Winters said one thing she is grateful for is how tragedy puts other things in perspective. "Many of the things that I thought were so important in life, well, they weren't," she said. "They just simply weren't."
"March 8 was a horrible day for me and for many others, for you, but it wasn't for Fred," she said. "What happened to him was wrong and it shouldn't have happened, but he is more alive than any of us sitting here right now in this room."
"And one day I am going to meet him at the gate of heaven. And it's my hope and it's my prayer that I'll meet you there, too."
The man who fired the shots that killed Fred Winters, Terry Sedlacek, was charged with first degree murder but found mentally unfit to stand trial. He is being in a state mental-health facility. Police don't know want prompted Sedlacek to target the pastor, but March 8 was marked "death day" in a planning calendar found at his home in nearby Troy, Ill.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.