The widow of murdered missionary Colin Lee told this week how people all over the world had been inspired by her husband?s ?courageous? death to take up God?s work.

Hedwig Lee, who left Bermuda yesterday to return to her home country of Paraguay with the couple?s month-old daughter, said she had received many positive messages since Mr. Lee was gunned down in Sudan last year.

?I thought it would be the opposite; I thought people will get scared,? she told a Women of Vision meeting in Devonshire on Monday night. ?I already got messages, mail from all countries, from many nations. People are being touched by his testimony and by his courageous losing his life.

?There are some people already in the mission field who left home after Colin?s homecoming. They say it inspired them. They say Colin showed us how to die courageously.?

Mrs. Lee was with her husband on their way to help war victims for the charity International Aid Services last November when they were ambushed and robbed by members of the rebel paramilitary group the Lord?s Resistance Army (LRA).

The 57-year-old aid worker was not instantly killed and his wife, then three months pregnant, had to drag him away from their car to get medical help.

Mrs. Lee told the meeting at the First Baptist Church on Middle Road that their final moments together were not private.

?Even at the moment when Colin took his last breath in an extremely humble little hospital in Yei, Sudan, we were surrounded by many, many people,? she said.

?There was no privacy at all. Probably more than a hundred people. When Colin took his last breath, first I wanted to will him back. But at the same time I saw a picture of Colin being received in Heaven like a royal person.?

Mrs. Lee spoke of her sorrow for her husband?s killers, whom she believes were children abducted from their homes in Uganda by the LRA. ?These kids are not there by their own will. They were young, young people. I saw them when they ambushed us. I was just screaming ?Jesus, Jesus, Jesus?.?

She said angels had kept her alive and God had made her invisible during dangerous missions to Africa. Of the last, fateful trip there she said she believed Jesus had saved her because of the couple?s unborn child, Shekinah Coline.

She spoke of her love for the little girl who will never meet her father. ?When I see my little girl Shekinah, she?s such a precious girl, such a blessing, such a sweetheart. I?m so vulnerable in loving her.?

She said that after her husband?s funeral she was unable to leave Bermuda because of complications with her pregnancy and that she spent her confinement praying in bed.

She explained how Mr. Lee?s family on the Island, especially his sister Gaylhia Le May, helped her cope.

?These last few months especially, the family Lee have seen me the most broken, crushed, crying, sometimes nervous. Love hurts so much but at the same time it?s the only way of real life.?

Mrs. Lee and her husband, a former Francis Patton and St. George?s Secondary School pupil who worked as a mason and carpenter at various construction firms before becoming a missionary, carried out aid work in 15 nations during their honeymoon.

?Colin and I in our teachings, we have said it so often, it?s not about us, it?s about nations and about generations. We didn?t know how much it would cost us in our own family but this is what we were saying everywhere and now we have to live it out in Jesus? name,? she said.

?I believe his last year in life he did more than many missionaries in 30 or more years. He impacted people everywhere. I thank the Lord for the privilege of having known such a man of God; such a man who was rescued from darkness into light and who really lived out light.?

Mrs. Lee told, in a moving and self-revelatory speech lasting more than an hour-and-a-half, how she was a former anorexic whose family, German Mennonites, fled to Paraguay during the Second World War and established a farm.

She said bitterness almost destroyed her relationship with her own mother until God spoke to her at the age of 17.

She said her work in Africa was about helping people to reconcile and free their hearts of bitterness.

?For a Mennonite I?m very crazy,? she joked. ?I don?t know how God will use me after my experience but I know there is so much pain and that?s why I can?t stop praying and crying for the nations and waiting for the day when they will see it fit for me to go back.?

She told the meeting that in her husband she ?found the man who was bold enough to go with me?.

?Colin was so courageous and I?m so grateful for his life. He knew that our breath could be counted on this earth but he was willing to go.

?I?m grateful to have seen in Colin, and people who have known Colin in the past knew a different Colin, but I have experienced a different man who was the priest in our house, who was the provider in his way, who was the man, who was the leader and I loved to submit to him.

?He was the father of this precious child and I?ll never forget how almost every evening during the first three months ... he laid his hand on my belly and blessed this little child.?