Sunday was Rosie's birthday so the whole family were at home together. They worshipped the Lord and gave thanks for her life and his goodness to them before having lunch.
After lunch it was time for birthday cake – it was at this moment that two young men entered the house, both armed with guns and demanded money, phones and watches.
“The whole family were dead still (with shock) – white as paper,” Rosie remembers. After looking around the house searching for things to steal but finding nothing, one of the men put a gun against her head and the other pointed his at point-blank range into her stomach.
“I'm going to kill her,” the robber declared, with his gun nervously wobbling in her side. She rose to her feet and shouted, “You will be killing a servant of the Lord!” Shutting her eyes, she thanked the Lord for her life, for the lives of the robbers and told them they could take her life.
She told the robbers that she was one of the people of God and it was her birthday. Rosie asked them if their mothers knew what they were doing and wouldn’t they be filled with embarrassment? “Have mercy on these boys,” she pleaded with the Lord. She demanded that they shoot her and leave the rest of the family alone.
Suddenly, filled with the fear of the Lord they turned and left the house, putting their guns away, waving saying “tchau tia” (good-bye aunt – aunt is a common mark of respect in Brazil – it's what pupils call their teacher).
“It was God who saved my life – there is no other explanation,” says Rosie, who is now praying for those two young men that the Lord would save them and that they would turn and follow Jesus.
She has no bad feeling towards them, just pain for them. She knows that God used her to speak to them.
“I am still in shock,” she says, “not only with what the robbers did, but also with what I did. I told them to kill me and they were filled with fear”.
Rosie invites us to join her in praying for these two young men, lost in a world of drugs and fear. Please also remember Rosie in your prayers – she is clearly a woman of faith yet she is human too and since this incident has been going through shock.
Her accompanying verse is Hebrews 12: 1: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”