Armed with faith: the amazing story of Antoinette Tuff

The scene had all the makings of yet another tragedy. Twenty-year-old Michael Hill walked into the Ronald E. McNair Learning Academy in Decatur, Georgia armed with an AK-47, five hundred rounds of ammunition, and in his words, “nothing to live for.”

Yet events in Decatur didn’t turn into another Newtown, thanks to the grace of God and a remarkable woman armed only with her faith.

That woman was Antoinette Tuff, the school’s bookkeeper. After Hill took her as a hostage, Tuff acted as the go-between for Hill and the authorities. It was Tuff who relayed Hill’s demands that the police stop using their radios and “stop all movement” or else he would start shooting.

But that’s not all that she did. Tuff started talking to her captor. Specifically, she started talking to him out of her own experience and as a Christian. As she told CNN, “I was just praying. . . . in the inside of myself and saying ‘God, what do I say now? What do I do now?’ I just kept saying that on the inside because I knew that I had no words to say.”