(NewsNation) — Seven-year-old Gabrielle was killed by her own father the day his divorce with her mother was finalized.
“Gabrielle from the minute she was born, was just effervescent is the word that comes to mind. She was bubbly, she loved life. She loved bringing joy to others. And she was really kind,” Gabrielle’s mother, Michelle Hord said. “After I lost her. I got amazing stories and pictures from her second-grade classmates about how she stopped bullies, how she went to grab kids from the buddy bench. So she was a very, very sweet loving spirit.”
It’s a tragedy that would have stopped many from even thinking they could go on. But now, Gabrielle’s mother is sharing her journey of faith and healing in a new book.
Hord discussed her book “The Other Side of Yet” during an appearance on “Morning in America”.
“At the beginning of the book, I talked about starting my career at “America’s Most Wanted” doing missing children’s stories,” she said. “And so walking into that crime scene that I’d walked into as a reporter so many times was obviously just surreal.”
“The Other Side of Yet” is an inspirational book about finding light in the darkest moments of your life. Hord writes about finding inner strength after her daughter was murdered by her ex-husband.
“What I realized really quickly was that this evil was trying to take me out. Whatever made this happen to my daughter, whatever decisions this person that I once knew made, was really an effort to destroy me,” Hord said. “And I was not going to allow that to happen. So I developed what I call a defiant faith to keep going.”
According to Hord, a defiant faith is “the faith in spite of.”
“I was raised in the Baptist church, my grandfather was a Baptist minister,” she said. “But regardless of your religious background, or if you have one at all, finding that thing that you can tether yourself to when you don’t see the light, that you will keep walking in the dark until you find it.”
Hord says the title of the book originates from a Bible verse in the Book of Job.
“Though he slay me yet do I trust him?” Hord said. “And that from the minute I was driven away from the crime scene popped into my head and heart. And so it started as a bit of a battle cry and a roadmap.”
Hord said “we all in our lives have these befores.”
“Hopefully, they don’t look like the one I had, right?” she said. “But we have COVID. We have divorces. We have infertility. We all have times in our lives, where things suddenly are not what they were.”
And so Hord asked herself, “How do you get from a before that is gone to an after that hasn’t happened? And for me ‘Yet’ is that pivot of possibility.”
Hord said the book is “about how I got to the other side of that hope and possibility.”
“I think the most important thing is there are times in your life when you feel like your ship has wrecked and you are the lone survivor. You may not even want to be here yet,” she said. “You are still here for a reason. And so I would challenge anyone who is going through that right now, to fight and to use that hope to figure out why you’re here that hope will lead you to the light.”
You can find out more about Michelle on her website.
Watch the full interview with Michelle Hord in the video player at the top of the page.