The Song She Never Expected to Sing

In 2002, Renee Napier received the phone call every parent dreads. Her daughter Meagan had been killed by a drunk driver named Eric Smallridge. The grief was crushing, the kind that buries itself in your bones and stays.

But over the months that followed, something unexpected began stirring in Renee's heart. She felt the Holy One pressing her toward something that made no human sense — forgiveness. Not the polite, surface-level kind. The radical, costly kind. Renee not only forgave Eric Smallridge, she petitioned the court for his early release from prison. Then she stood beside him at speaking events, telling their story together.

When songwriter Matthew West heard about Renee and Eric, he wrote the song Forgiveness, capturing the impossible weight of what she had done. One lyric asks the question we all ask: "It flies in the face of all I believe." And that is exactly the point. Forgiveness is not a feeling we muster. It is a grace we receive and then, by the power of God, extend.

What strikes me most is that Renee did not wait until forgiveness felt natural. She stepped toward it while every nerve in her body screamed the opposite direction. She understood something Paul wrote to the Ephesians: "Forgive one another, as God in Christ forgave you."

The Almighty does not ask us to forgive because the offender deserves it. He asks because He knows that unforgiveness locks us in a prison of our own making — and He has already paid the price to set us free.