It would be easy to spend hours with Hudson and have no idea what she’s been through. Sitting on a deep purple sofa inside a quiet room in an L.A. photo studio, she chats aboutWhitney Houston or her three Pomeranians (Dreamgirl, Oscar, and Grammy) in her usual plainspoken, unpretentious way. But if the conversation strays into sensitive territory, she becomes quiet. Ask about her Grammy performance of ”You Pulled Me Through,” for instance, and she says, ”I like to be led by the emotion of a song. I want the audience to experience what I’m feeling.” But ask why she chose that song — a song about being rescued from darkness and despair, about a faith lost and then restored — and her warm brown eyes go blank. ”I don’t know what to tell you,” she says flatly. Hudson still does not talk about the murders, even with those closest to her. ”I try not to say anything about it,” says her childhood friend and longtime assistant, Walter Williams III. ”She’s okay as long as people don’t bring it up. She’s trying to put all of that behind her.” But Williams has no doubt why Hudson performed ”You Pulled Me Through” at the Grammys, or to whom she was singing. ”She was singing to God,” he says. ”God pulled her through.”

God, family, and music are the three interwoven, inexorable strands of Hudson’s life. When she was growing up, her world revolved around Pleasant Gift Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, where her family had prayed, and sung, for generations. ”We were what you call ‘born in the church,”’ Hudson says, smiling. ”I would go with my grandmother and my mom, and when I was little, I would fall asleep on their laps in the choir stand.” In what has since become family legend, Hudson, the youngest of three children, sang her first note while sitting on her godmother’s lap at choir practice. She was less than a year old. ”She hadn’t said a word, and all of a sudden she hit this soprano note, such a beautiful, clear, high-pitched note,” says her godmother, Debra Nichols Windham. ”I jumped up and ran to the front of the church and said, ‘This baby’s going to sing!”’

JHUD WISDOM: ”Too often we look at things through human eyes. But when you look at the world spiritually, it makes far more sense. I don’t think I would be here without it.”

Hudson says her faith has shaped every aspect of who she is. ”The church has given me balance,” she says. ”Too often we look at things through human eyes. But when you look at the world spiritually, it makes far more sense. I don’t think I would be here without it.” You can hear the gospel influence in almost every song Hudson performs, from her soaring, cathedral-high vocals to her choice of material. ”I like to have songs with me that have substance,” Hudson says. ”That’s missing from a lot of today’s music. You might hear a song with a catchy beat, but what’s it about? It’s not empowering or helping anyone.” Her album brims with anthems to self-belief (”Invisible”), self-determination (”Spotlight”), and defiance (”And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going”). The final track is a hymn, ”Jesus Promised Me a Home Over There.” ”It’s a song that my grandmother used to lead in church,” Hudson says. ”I wanted a tribute to her.”

Of course, there’s a playful, secular side to Hudson, too, and you see it most clearly in her relationship with Williams, who has been her friend and champion since they met in sixth-grade choir. ”She was always sticking her hand under my shirt and rubbing on my chest,” Williams says, laughing. ”We shouldn’t be doing those things in grade school, right?” After high school, Hudson’s music career was going nowhere, so Williams became her manager. Kinda. ”I would take her to the gay clubs and they would have these talent competitions, mainly for drag queens, and I would put Jennifer in them as the only real female,” he says. ”And she would win all the time and take all those drag queens’ money. They were so mad!” Hudson and Williams even stuck together through every minute of her American Idolaudition in Atlanta in 2003. ”I paid for the hotel room and she paid for the car, I think,” he says. ”I’d buy her clothes on my American Express card and then she’d perform in them and I’d return them the next day.” He never stopped believing in her. ”I promised her that I wouldn’t stop until the whole world saw her,” he says. She placed only seventh on Idol, but she was on her way. ”You know, out of all this, all the press and the accolades, she has remained true to herself,” Williams says. ”She’s still the same sweet girl I met in grammar school. She’s still Jennifer.”

J-HUD WISDOM: ”It’s one of the most beautiful things, to see that love from fans, but it can be a bit much. I don’t like it when people get all emotional and cry. I don’t want you to cry. It makes me uncomfortable.”

It is tempting to view Hudson now only through the lens of her family tragedy, to imagine we hear her grief in every note she sings. Her rich, soulful voice has always elicited strong emotions from her fans, but now the effect is heightened. Since Oct. 26, sales of her album have almost doubled, according to Nielsen Soundscan, and downloads of her song ”You Pulled Me Through” skyrocketed after her Grammy performance. In a cruel irony, her private suffering has only increased her public profile. She’s getting recognized, and approached, more often. ”It’s one of the most beautiful things, to see that love from fans, but it can be a bit much,” Hudson says. ”I don’t like it when people get all emotional and cry. I don’t want you to cry. It makes me uncomfortable. The other day this lady came up to me and got really close to me, and I thought, ‘What is it that makes people want to…embrace me? And how do I react to it?”’ To protect herself from that, she’d need to build the very walls that her music brings down.