The Hon. Wilma A. Lewis, chief judge of the district court of the U.S. Virgin Islands, spoke about her “amazing trip from a small island and back again” as part of the Jeanette Barnes Zug lecture at the Saal of the Gemeinhaus.

The lecture highlighted her experiences as a lifelong Moravian and civil servant. She left the Virgin Islands in 1974 after graduating high school and returned 37 years later as a district court judge.

Her journey has been one she believes has been guided by God.

“He made the ordinary, extraordinary,” she said. “I tried to use the gifts that He blessed me with.” Growing up in the Virgin Islands was a “community, small town environment. Everybody knows everybody else,” she said.

Family was very important and her parents were very influential in her life, she said. She recalled one friend telling her “all parents are not like yours” and that left a deep impression of how her family must look to others. “They saw my parents too, saw how supportive they were,” she said.

“They encouraged me to reach for the stars. I never had to look further than the four walls of my own house to find a role model,” Lewis said. Her parents were treasurers of their church parish. They brought home the offering weekly to count it, making a point never to let the offering stay in the home overnight. No matter what time the counting was done, they would take it to the bank deposit drop. That example of trust, honesty and integrity left an impression, she said. Her parents also led a life of life of public service and showed her “race and gender are not impediments to one’s abilities.”

Lewis attended Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School. During college and law school, she said, “I came to respect that people have different perspectives. There’s a big world out there.” Harvard was her dream school, she said. Afterward, she chose a life of public service, starting as a U.S. Attorney for seven years

“I loved it,” she said. When a phone call came asking her to come to the Department of the Interior, she answered it “with much trepidation,” Lewis said, although she found “It was much the same work, but different experience, different exposure.”

While later serving in government, Lewis said she held on to the lessons learned in her Moravian upbringing. “I kept holding on to the foundation that I had built way back when.”

She then served in the Department of the Interior, where, she said, the role required her to “not be influenced, be independent” of political circumstances.

Her first presidential appointment was as a U.S. Attorney from 1990 to 2001. Then from 2001 to 2007 she joined the law firm of Crowell and Moring, focusing on practical law. In 2008 she was named assistant secretary for land and minerals management in the Department of the Interior, where she said she gained experience and exposure as assistant to a cabinet member.

In 2011 she was able to combine her goal of being a district court judge with an opportunity to return to the Virgin Islands.

“I always wanted to go back be a federal district court judge the two came together,” she said. She became chief justice in 2013.

As a judge, Lewis said, she is in a position of making decisions all the time. When working in the public eye, she said, “There’s a lot of second guessing, a lot of talking heads who knew better then you how the decision was made.”

“You have to get used to the noise and do your work notwithstanding the noise,” she said.

“More important than the position itself is the person that you are over time. You have to be comfortable enough with what you’re doing and how you’re doing it,” she said.

“I’m going to define the position. I am not going to let the position define who I am.”

Lewis also said she is grateful to have had the positions she has held over her career.

“I’m not entitled to have any of these positions. I’m honored to have them. Wherever there is that confidence, the person is going to win,” she said.