The Song She Shouldn't Have Been Able 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 bends a person in half and doesn't let go.

But then Renee did something that bewildered everyone around her. She forgave Eric Smallridge. Not quietly, not privately — she went to court and advocated for a reduction in his prison sentence. She visited him behind bars. She told him she forgave him, face to face.

When singer-songwriter Matthew West heard Renee's story, he wrote Forgiveness for his 2012 album Into the Light. The lyrics capture the raw, impossible math of grace: "It'll clear the bitterness away, it can even set a prisoner free." In the music video, Renee herself appears — not as an actor, but as a mother who chose mercy over vengeance.

Here is what stops me every time I hear that song: forgiveness didn't come because the pain disappeared. It came because Renee let the God who forgave her flow through her broken heart toward the man who shattered it.

Paul wrote, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32). Forgiveness is never easy. But when we remember how much the Almighty has forgiven us, we find the strength to release others — not because they deserve it, but because He did it first.