Being Shot Was My Miracle Blessing: Dr. Aquanetta Davis on Faith, Survival, and Purpose

There is still a bullet in Dr. Aquanetta Davis's spine. She was shot five times in a drive-by shooting, and she says the Holy Ghost later showed her where the bullets entered and left her body. One stayed. It will remind her, she was told, like the thorn in Paul's side, so that she never forgets the miracle.

That is how Davis talks about the worst day of her life. She put it plainly when she sat down with Dr. Anita Turner on Won't God Do It:

"Being shot was my miracle blessing."

She knows how that sounds. Much of her story explains why she means it.

The Path Without Wrinkles

Davis says she was given to the Lord. Her mother was a choir director. Her grandmother was an educator who told stories of buying her home on faith. When Davis was a child, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and given three months to live. Davis overheard the doctor and prayed, "God, please save my mama."

That early foundation shapes how she reads hardship now. Scripture says to trust in the Lord and lean not on your own understanding, she notes, but most of us want something else from God.

"We look for the pretty things in God: the pretty path, the path without wrinkles, the path without problems and transgressions."

God is in all things, she says, good, bad, and indifferent. Was the shooting discipline? She isn't sure. She is sure He never left her.

"I Have to Take Care of My Children"

On the night of the shooting, Davis had just dropped off a friend when, she says, the Holy Spirit came upon her. She noticed a young woman nearby who looked like her. They had the same brown hair, the same brown car, and the same braces. She believes she was shot because she matched whoever the shooters were looking for.

Back in her car, she told the man she was with that they had to get their lives right with God. Moments later a car rolled by, and she waved it on. It was the car that shot her.

At first she didn't know she'd been hit. She describes leaving her body and traveling up a tunnel toward heaven three times. On the third trip, she saw grass that looked like fingers and heard a voice tell her she would speak miracles, write music, and see people healed and delivered. She answered with one plea, over and over:

"Yes, God. But I can't die. I have to take care of my children."

On her way back, she saw a boy and a girl waving at her. Years later, she says, the Holy Ghost told her those were the miracle children who had since come into her family.

In the ambulance, her lungs were collapsing. The paramedics ran through their checklist, asking whether she was in a gang and whether she was on drugs, and she couldn't get a word out. "God, it's you and I," she remembers thinking. In the ER she heard them call a code blue. She woke up in a bed full of tubes. Her kidney and liver were untouched, and even her lungs had been repaired.

Skin Deep, Bulletproof

The name of the ministry that grew from that night came in pieces. Davis was already doing outreach, working with the LAPD at drive-by scenes and advocating in her community, with no church building and no name for what she did. Then her god-sister asked what it all meant to her. Davis realized that "everything happened in my life under the surface." That became Skin Deep. Later, on a TV show, she was asked what she considered herself after the shooting, and she said "bulletproof," a word she believes the Holy Spirit gave her.

The two halves became two kinds of work. Skin Deep serves women and children through intercession and resources, and Bulletproof works with gang members. For Davis, bulletproof also names what she was shown growing up between Beverly Hills and the Crenshaw district. That included the inner city, but it also included Black excellence.

Find Your Pretty

Her other ministry, PRETTY, came out of grief. The name stands for Perfecting Royalty, Edifying True Testimony in You. Davis's mother had been a valedictorian, a known genius written up in the papers, but illness kept her from living out her full potential. She used to call her daughter "pretty girl." After her mother's death, Davis asked God what pretty really meant.

"Pretty could be pretty profound, pretty excellent. And it could be pretty ugly."

The heart of PRETTY is that your pretty won't look like anyone else's. Her grandmother told her to show off her strong legs while she still could. Some women have beautiful smiles, and some have beautiful shoulders. In ministry, the question becomes what you are excellent at and what can be perfected in you so you feel confident. None of it happens alone. Women too often compete instead of completing one another, she says. "We're better together than apart."

It's the same lesson she learned in that car, one bullet and one survival at a time. Her pretty was never going to come from the path without wrinkles. Her word to anyone listening is that "you are loved intentionally, on purpose." Know God's voice, perfect the gift He put in you, and "find someone to help you edify that, and find someone to find you in you."