"Bishop Michael D. Williams was a good man, now ... now ... now, I don't mean a good man as in the kind of man who does good things for himself. No, you see this man was a man of God; he was the kind of man that would set aside his troubles to help the next man straighten out his own. Mike was a God fearing man, a devil hating man, and a family man. He was 'The Man', and we gone miss him ... we gone miss him."

"But wipe away your tears congregation, because this man went on home to do his work for the Lord. Can I get an amen up in here, saints?" Deacon Towers wiped the sweat that was dripping his brow with a snow-white silk handkerchief. His eyes seemed to be misting, but for the most part he managed to keep his cool demeanor as he gave the eulogy for his very best friend. He began to pace back and forth in front of the dais, every so often glancing at the coffin that seemed to stare at him from the pulpit down below. Every step he took became more dramatic than the last. His movements were almost animated; he pranced and danced in front of his audience. Although he appeared to be in charge and holding up pretty well on the outside, I could tell that he was a ball of confusion.

He was nervous, he was sad and he was angry that his friend was gone, but he didn't let those emotions stop him from shouting out praises about a man that he loved like a brother, his best friend, and my husband, Bishop Michael D. Williams.

This eulogy was something that only he could deliver. He and Mike had been good friends for years, and Calvin Towers felt that he was the only one who could give his friend the home going that he deserved, and in my opinion, he was the only one who truly knew the "Real Michael".

I sat in the front row of our sixteen thousand square foot church, wondering how I got there in the first place. There I sat, only forty years old, and already a widow. I halfway listened to deacon Calvin Towers, as I noticed for the one-hundredth time, how good-looking he was. He was all of five feet and nine inches tall, and had golden brown skin the color of freshly ground cinnamon. His thick wavy low faded hair glistened from the pulpit as he strutted from one end to the other, hyping up the crowd with his unwritten eulogy.

I wanted to listen but I couldn't. There were too many thoughts running through my mind as I clutched the obituary of my forty three year old dead husband in my right hand, and held the hand of my nineteen year old daughter Keneatra, with my left. I stared at the colorful obituary and asked myself what happened? How did we end up like this? Where did we go wrong? Or was it wrong from the beginning?

I stopped focusing on the obituary and looked at my dead husband lying in the handmade platinum casket. He didn't look dead. He just looked as if he were sleeping.

I studied him, and wondered if God really did let fools into Heaven. I wondered if my husband, the bishop reverend Michael D. Williams, had really given his life to God before he died. I wondered if he had repented for all of the lying, sneaking and late night creeping, that he had done in the last twenty years. I wondered if he had gotten God to accept him for who he truly was, and for the biggest of Sins that he had committed.

I stopped focusing on Michael, and his lifeless body, and started to pay attention to all of the sobbing church members that filled the room.

Most of the crying and screaming came from the women. Some were young and some were old, some were married but most were single. There were light skinned ones and dark skinned ones, some tall thin ones and some short heavy set ones. They all seemed different, but most of them all had the same things in common. They were all members of the church family that we had built together, and they had all been in love with my husband.

I looked around at them as they acted a fool, and carried on as if 'JESUS' himself had been persecuted. I looked at each and every one of them, and tried to tell which ones had also been marked for death. I wanted to know if I could tell by looking at them, which one would be next in line for the ultimate punishment.

Most of them looked healthy as they cried and sobbed, but a few of them had already started to shows signs of weakness as their thinning bodies proved what they had always denied.

I was starting to be able to tell which ones had bedded my husband, and which ones would be punished next.

I looked around at the huge church that sat at least four thousand people. With Michael gone the church and its members were all my responsibility and I had no idea what I wanted to do with it. I didn't know if I wanted to sell it, or if I wanted to continue on as the first lady and appoint someone to act as the Pastor. One thing that I was sure of though was that everything that had happened in the last twenty years was GODS Will.

I looked back down at the obituary, and at the picture of my husband on the cover. He was as fine on the picture as he had been in real life. His dark chocolate skin looked flawless against the chocolate colored, Armani suit that he wore. He smiled that dazzling white smile as he focused on the camera; his jet-black low cut fade glistened and shined against the sunlight.

I remembered the day that the picture had been taken a couple of years before at the church picnic.

Looking at the picture brought back several unwanted memories, and for once I realized that life was truly short, and that neither today nor tomorrow was promised to any of us. The fact that Michael was gone just hadn't sank in as of yet. It seemed like in one year we had lived one thousand life times and now it was all over. What a difference a single day could make.

I smiled down remembering that I actually took the photo of him and I could remember thinking to myself that even though I hated him, I just couldn't stop loving him.

I sat staring at the obituary, and wondered if I would ever cry for the actual death of my husband. I had cried so much in the last twenty years for the death and rebirth of my marriage, I just didn't have any tears left.

I heard the choir get up and sing, "Going up Yonder." I started to giggle to myself as I hummed along to the words. What if Michael didn't go up yonder? The thought was silly, but I needed to laugh just a little. I was all cried out, and when you are all cried out, just maybe a laugh is in order.

My sixteen-year-old daughter Shayla, who was sitting on the other side of me, hugged me tight. She must have thought that I was weeping instead of giggling tears of joy. I stopped the giggling and tried to pull myself together. In a way I felt good because I was finally free. I was finally going to have the chance to live my life on my terms, and I was happy about that. I had never been on my own before, and I didn't know what it would be like to be in charge, but I welcomed the idea. Of course I was sad that Mike was gone, and I was afraid of being alone, but there was some sort of sick satisfaction I got from knowing that people did pay for their sins and betrayals.

Mike was my husband, he was a provider, and sometimes a good father, but all in all what he had done to me was wrong, and it wasn't for me to judge him, but he had been punished, and all I could do was rejoice in the fact that GOD'S Will had been done.

As the choir got louder and more joyful in their song, my three daughters along with everyone else in the church stood up and started rocking back and forth to the music. I stayed in my seat and kept on looking at the obituary. Michael seemed to be looking directly at me. In my mind, he was still alive. "See Mike, I told you that he who laughs last laughs the loudest. I told you that everything that you do in the dark will come to the light. I told you that every man reaps what he sows, but you didn't listen, and now look at what happened. I can't believe that you didn't have Faith." I mumbled to him as if he could hear me. For some reason, I believed that he could. I don't know, I think I am losing my mind.

As I continued to talk to him, wherever he was, tears started running down my cheeks. I was crying and sobbing and I could not stop. Nobody came to my rescue because they were all caught up in the joy that the choir was bringing.

As I cried, my mind started to drift back to a time when things were much simpler in my life. I thought about a time when life was almost good to me. I could still remember it well. It was twenty-two years ago, that I had my first real encounter with Michael. It was a day that I would always remember, because it was the day that my destiny would be laid out for me.

The Day was December the 8th 1988, and I was a shy and insecure nineteen year old, church going, virgin.

I remember the day so well because it was the weekend that my devout Christian mother had went away to a weekend retreat with her church. She had left my sister Carla and I home alone for the entire weekend. I was three years older than Carla and by far the more responsible of the two. Before my mother left, she laid down a list of rules that Carla was supposed to abide by. She didn't give me any rules, she just told me to watch Carla and to make sure that she did her chores.

She didn't bother to give me the same lecture and speech that she had just given to Carla about not being with boys, or engaging in sex or drugs over the weekend, because she just knew that those rules did not apply to me because nobody wanted to have sex with me in the first place.

You see; Carla was the cute one. She was high yellow, with flawless skin the color of a peeled banana, she had sparkling gray eyes, and teeth so white you could see her smiling from across a busy city street. She was short, and curvy, and had long thin golden brown hair that hung loosely past her shoulders. She had red freckles sprinkled on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose and she just knew that she was all of that and then some.

She looked a lot like our mama who also had that bright flawless skin. Their skin was so light that they could almost pass for being White, and most certainly pretend to be a Latino if they wanted to.

As for me, I took after my dads' side of the family.

My skin was the color of a roasted coffee beans and prone to break outs, I had one dimple in my left cheek, and long thick hair, except mines wasn't that pretty golden brown color. It was jet black. Even though I had long hair, it was far from the 'good hair' that my sister possessed. My hair was so thick and unmanageable, that I could never wear it down or loose. I would go to the beauty shop, and they would spend hours washing, detangling, blow drying, and then running a pressing comb through it. I can remember sitting through hours of excruciating pain and agony, and when it was all said and done, my hair would be pretty for about three hours, but by the end of the day it would be a big thick afro.

It just wasn't worth all the time and effort I had spent trying to manage it, so I just wore it pinned up in a pony tail or I would have my mother put a thousand bobby pins in it and wear it in a bun.

To top it all off, I wore huge bottle capped type glasses, because I had terrible eyesight. As far as my body went, I was just plain old fat, well not fat but so thick, that I always felt as if my size sixteen body was just one candy bar away from being huge. To make matters even worse, my small breasts made my shape look un-proportionate. I guess you could say that I was not the bomb, and I didn't need any body to confirm that fact. Every day I was reminded of how cute I was not, by the way every body treated me.

It wasn't that people intentionally treated me bad during my teenage years; it was the fact that they just didn't acknowledge me. My own mother used to seem too embarrassed to take me out. All through high school, I worked at the Lucky Drug store down the street from my house, and it seemed like every time I was scheduled to work, my mother would invite Carla to go somewhere. They would go to church functions or just shopping and have lunch together.

One time my grand mother, who was half White, asked my mother how come she never took me anywhere and mother just laughed and told her, "The reason that I don't ask Faith to go anywhere is because she is always working. Plus she is not the type who likes to do things, she likes to be alone." I guess my grandmother believed the bogus answer that my mother gave, and for some strange reason I almost believed it too. It was easy to believe that her not spending time with me was my own fault, but in my heart I knew that my mother really didn't want to be seen with me because I was not her ideal picture of beauty.

She always told me that I looked too much like my daddy's people, and she hated his people more than she hated him. They had divorced when I was only three years old, and even though my mother would always say that they divorced because he wasn't a Christian man, and that he was a sinning, good for nothing drunk, the rumors that circulated in the family told a different story.

According to the gossip that had been spread through the family grapevine, my mother and father stopped getting along after my mother joined the Miracle and Praise Church Of God In Christ, and became holier than every body else.

She and my father had gotten together very young, and he had worked as an engineer at a car factory. She didn't work. Instead she filled her time being a homemaker. One day she met a lady who invited her to a church function and she, being bored with being a housewife, accepted the modest invitation, and pretty soon the church was her life.

Every time the doors to the church opened my mother was there. She joined every committee that the church had to offer. She stopped taking care of home and stopped paying attention to my father's needs and wants and eventually he started filling his time by hanging out and getting drunk. He had no reason to come home after work because he knew that his wife went to church on Tuesday nights for bible study, Wednesday afternoon for afternoon prayer, and then back again that night for Wednesday worship, Thursday afternoon for the Pastors aide committee meeting, again that same night for choir rehearsal, Friday night was youth night, Saturday was street witnessing day, and on Sunday's we had three full services that held up the day, and I do mean the whole day.

Mom was so involved that she had the nerve to reserve Monday's as the day that she did the churches books. Church was her life, and she had found God, and when she found God she realized that the love she once had for her hard working young husband, just wasn't the love that she was looking for any more.

Even though my mother and father argued a lot during that time, her faith in God and her religious beliefs would not allow her to get a divorce. Getting a divorce was against the rules for Christians, so she tried to stick it out with him.

According to the family rumors, he had begged and pleaded for her to spend time with him; to spend time with us. He wanted to be a family again but my mother told him that she could not change and that if he wanted to be a family, then he should learn to be a man, a God fearing man, like her pastor.

My father's heart was crushed, and it wasn't long before he stopped coming home after work and he started having affairs with several women.

When my mother noticed that he wasn't coming home because he was laid up in other women's beds she just kept quiet and prayed on the situation. She even sought advice and guidance from her pastor. Eventually my father got tired of the cheating and reasoned with his wife. Everything seemed like it was going to work out between them, when my mother became pregnant with their second child.

My father was happy and vowed to my mother that he would stop his cheating and his drinking. He even promised to give his life to the Lord. He started going to church and he even got saved. We were a family.

I was just two years old, but I still remember how happy my young parents were at that time. We would go to church on Sunday mornings, and after the afternoon service, we would go home and my mother would serve us the dinner that she had stayed up preparing the night before. A lot of the time the pastor would bring his wife and their four young children to have dinner with us.

My mother and father would laugh and joke with them and they would talk about every body that acted a fool in church that day. The pastor and his wife were both a lot older than my parents. My parents were only twenty-five years old and the pastor and first lady were both in their early forties, but they seemed to enjoy being around my youthful parents and they developed a strong bond with them.

Pretty soon everything that we did, we did with their family. We went on vacation with them and we stayed at their house a lot.

When my mother went into labor, my father called my grandmother first, and then he called Eileen, the pastor's wife. He dropped me off at my grandmother's house and then he stopped to pick Eileen up on the way to the hospital. I have been told that my father prayed outside of my mother's hospital room, while Mrs. Eileen stayed in the room to help my mother deliver her new baby.