“After Charlie finished, I met him backstage, and I spoke to him, and I’ll never forget this,” she continued. “I said, ‘Charlie, baby, please talk to me next time before you say that statement. Because when you say something like that—there is so much power in that verse. When you say, Here I am, Lord, use me, God will take you up on that,’ and he did with Charlie.”
“Eleven days ago, God accepted that total surrender from my husband, and then called him to his side. More than anything, Charlie wanted to do, not his will, but God’s will,” Erika added. She shared that “over these past 11 days through all the pain, never before have I found as much comfort as I now do in the words of our Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy will be done.'”
Erika described the shock and horror she experienced identifying her husband’s body at the hospital hours after he was shot.
“I saw the faintest smile [on Charlie] and that told me something important,” she explained. “It revealed to me a great mercy from God in this tragedy. When I saw that, it told me Charlie didn’t suffer.”
“Even the doctor told me it was something so instant that, even if Charlie had been shot in the operating room itself, nothing could have been done,” she said.
“One moment Charlie was doing what he loved—arguing and debating on campus, fighting for the gospel truth in front of a big crowd. And then he blinked. He blinked and saw his savior in paradise,” said Erika.
Referencing the fact that some churches have noted an uptick in church attendance and first-time church attenders, Erika said that in the last 10 days, she has seen God’s love and mercy.
“We didn’t see violence. We didn’t see rioting. We didn’t see revolution. Instead, we saw what my husband always prayed he would see in this country. We saw revival,” she said.
Erika encouraged those in the stadium and around the world who just made a decision to follow Jesus that it isn’t easy, but “it’s not supposed to be.”
“Jesus said, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me,’” Erika proclaimed. “He said he would be persecuted. He said we would be persecuted. Charlie knew that, and happily carried his cross all the way to the end.”
