Aurora Shooting Victim: The First Thing I Want to Say to Him is ‘I Forgive You,’ and the Next is, ‘Can I Pray for You?’
Yahoo News with a wonderful story today:
It would be understandable for the victims of the Colorado theater shooting and their families to want to seek retribution.
But Pierce O’Farrill, a 28-year-old who was shot three times, says he has forgiven James Holmes, the suspected shooter in last week’s Aurora, Colo., massacre.
“Of course, I forgive him with all my heart,” O’Farrill told reporters shortly before his release from the Univ. of Colorado Hospital on Wednesday. “When I saw him in his hearing, I felt nothing but sorrow for him–he’s just a lost soul right now.”
O’Farrill–a staffer at the Denver Rescue Mission, a Christian charity organization that helps “people at their physical and spiritual points of need, with the goal of returning them to society as productive, self-sufficient citizens”–told the Denver Post he would eventually like to meet Holmes.
“I want to see him sometime,” O’Farrill, one of 58 people wounded in the shooting, said. “The first thing I want to say to him is ‘I forgive you,’ and the next is, ‘Can I pray for you?’”
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Image courtesy shutterstock / wongwean
Tragedy acts as a crucible. Bad people get worse, complain, blame, and impose their grief, but good people shine on through it, emerging stronger on the other side of it. If there is any glimpsing into the mind of God, this would be one reason bad things happen to good people. Although “Why” is the stinging question that is never answered to anybody’s satisfaction, it ennobles mankind that people like Mr. O’Farrill lead the way out of tragedy with optimism and forgiveness. God bless him.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hb 11:1.
I read lots that I agree with in these pages, but introducing this story as “wonderful” makes me feel a little ill.
The shooting victim is entitled to feel what he wants to feel. He is, after all, victim of a terrible crime. But I don’t think that the rest of us should be led to believe that it’s “wonderful” to forgive the perpetrator of such a heinous crime so easily, without any indication of his contrition, or acceptance of all the lives he’s just ended. Seriously.
It would be a pretty boring publication if all we did was tell people what they wanted to hear and never provoked them to think in a different way.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven; give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, now and forever. Amen.
I don’t see how this is a “wonderful story”. It seems to me that forgiveness in the wake of an unspeakably destructive act is some kind of psychological failing.
“It seems to me that forgiveness in the wake of an unspeakably destructive act is some kind of psychological failing.”
and yet that is exactly what God has done for us through His Son Jesus
When Pope John Paul II got out of the hospital after being shot by Memhet Ali Agca, he went to Agca’s jail cell and forgave him. Agca is now a Catholic.
The third thing? “Stand still while I get my sights aligned.”
In the words of R.S. Field, from the song “The Rest Will Take Care of Itself”
Everybody needs forgiveness,
even if they don’t deserve.
Everybody needs salvation,
even if they don’t believe a word…
The third thing to say to him is that he is lucky to be alive.
The fourth thing to say to him is that in prison bad things happen to kid killers.