Bullets for the Battle

The Bullet of Forgiveness: The Easter Miracle!

Most people want to be forgiven when they fail! Yet they often find forgiveness is difficult to give to others, especially when the “crime” against them is horrific … to their minds if not also to an objective observer. There are some events that anyone would agree are horrible in the extreme. How does one forgive the unforgivable? Consider the following story:

Visual images have power. The more compelling the image, the more power it wields over our thoughts and emotions. In the age of photography some pictures become so well known they form part of our national consciousness. One such is the image taken on June 8, 1972, by AP Photographer Nick Út. The picture would later win him a Pulitzer Prize. It was of nine-year-old Kim Phuc running down Viet Nam Route 1 surrounded by other fleeing children! Kim was naked, the victim of third-degree burns over half her body from Napalm bombs dropped mistakenly from a South Vietnamese airplane. In many ways it became emblematic of the tragedy of war; few who see the image will ever fully forget the horror it invokes. It was one of the most powerful pictures ever taken of how the innocent suffer for the insanity of human conflict.

Kim Phuc was treated for her burns in a Saigon hospital where she spent fourteen months and endured seventeen painful operations over a third of her body. But there was another wound that could not be so easily treated, her shame. She said of the thoughts running through her mind as she ran naked and burned, “… I would be ugly and people would treat me in a different way.”

After the fall of Viet Nam, her communist government used her as an anti-war symbol. She finally managed to seek sanctuary in Canada in 1992, where she, her husband and children live in Ajax, Ontario. She submitted an essay to the “This I Believe” project in 2007 in which she recounts her conversion to Christ as her Lord:

“I hated my life. I hated all people who were normal because I was not normal. I really wanted to die many times. It was another very low point in my young life. I spent my day time in the library to read a lot of religious books to find a purpose for my life. One of the books that I read was the Holy Bible. In Christmas 1982, I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. It was an amazing turning point in my life. God helped me to learn to forgive – the most difficult of all lessons. It didn’t happen in a day and it wasn’t easy. But I finally got it.

Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days but my heart is cleansed.”

What an image! What a lesson! At the very heart of Easter is forgiveness … complete, free, pure, liberating, cleansing, priceless forgiveness. The child in the heart-wrenching photo that documents her pain and her shame discovered how deep and full it is. As we celebrate this Easter, let us wonder and praise anew for our Lord’s sacrifice. We, like Kim, may know we are forgiven and can learn to forgive in equal measure. Regardless of all the agonies that hammer this fallen world, our Lord’s spiritual surgery will fully heal our bodies, our minds and our hearts. He will do it for both the innocent and the guilty. Let us rejoice in His resurrection as the Father’s perfect approval upon the necessity of the Savior’s cross. Let us praise Him with cleansed hearts! Forgiveness is our only escape from the falleness of man and our entry into the Presence of God!

“But Jesus was saying, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing’…" Luke 23:34

May our Lord grant you a most meaningful and life-changing Easter!