COMMENTARY: The transforming power of forgiveness

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(at)compuserve.com.) UNDATED _ Cultural critics complain, with some justification, […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(at)compuserve.com.)

UNDATED _ Cultural critics complain, with some justification, that nobody writes good Christmas songs or stories any more, which is a serious problem here in the season of hope.


I’m no Dickens, but I do have a true story about the transforming nature of love, one that is played out on a much larger stage than the tale of the family Cratchit, spanning decades and continents, peacetime and war.

It all began some 24 years ago. I was a top-ranking White House aide, a man of nominal faith and considerable power. Picking up the paper one day, I was overcome by a picture that will hang forever in the gallery of human pain: Kim Phuc, a South Vietnamese child, running naked down a street. Her village had been napalmed. Her grandmother and two younger brothers had been incinerated. She was severely burned.

No person can look at such a picture and not be deeply moved. And because I was part of the administration prosecuting this war, there was no escaping a sense of personal responsibility, which made my agony deeper. While I believed that we were right to oppose the communist onslaught, our decisions, nonetheless, contributed to the horrors experienced by this helpless child and many like her. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, the old adage says, which is also true for those who serve at the prince’s side.

Kim’s life and mine changed immensely in the years to come.

Nick Ut, the Associated Press photographer who snapped that famous picture, took her to a hospital, where she received years of burn therapy. After the war, she enrolled at the university in Saigon, hoping to become a doctor. But when government officials found out that she was the girl in the photo, she was deployed as a propaganda tool.

Meanwhile, I came to know very well what is meant by another old saying:”Power is fleeting.” As Kim rose from her wartime ordeal, I sank into an ordeal of a different kind. Yet in the furnace of Watergate and prison, my life changed _ perhaps more so than Scrooge’s. I surrendered my life to Christ and received a new life and a new passion: serving the”least of these mine brethren”in prisons throughout the world. Those who had been last on the list for a powerful White House aide had become first in the heart of a transformed man.

We never totally escape our past, of course, and throughout those years I would think of that poor Vietnamese girl, wondering what had happened to her, wondering if she had survived. Unknown to me, Kim’s spiritual life was moving in the same direction as my own.

In 1986, the Vietnamese government sent her to Cuba. There she met and married Bui Huy Toan, an evangelical Christian, and Kim herself surrendered her life to Christ. On the way to their 1992 Moscow honeymoon, the two defected in Toronto while changing planes.


The stage was now set for a remarkable conclusion to this story.

Fast forward to a Veterans’ Day service at Washington’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, where Kim told those assembled:”As you know, I am the little girl who was running to escape from the napalm fire. I have suffered a lot from both physical and emotional pain. Sometimes I thought I could not live, but God saved my life and gave me faith and hope.” Then Kim forgave the unknown pilot whose load of napalm seared her skin and killed three family members, a message that spoke directly to all of us who played a role in that war.”Even if I could talk face-to-face with the pilot who dropped the bomb,”she said,”I would tell him we cannot change history, but we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.” Simple, direct words. Yet how many who have suffered as Kim had suffered could actually bring themselves to speak those words?

And so, in this perfect moment of forgiveness, the once-powerless girl metaphorically approached the once-powerful man, strangers in face but whose lives have been entwined for nearly a quarter century, and said”All is well.” In our shared religion we call this”a meeting at the foot of the cross,”a place where our faith reconciles us to one another no matter how deep the wounds we inflict, no matter what the distance between us. And while we believe that all stand equal at that place, sometimes is seems that some are more equal than others. But who could not be humbled by the grace evident in the life of this young woman?

The story does not end at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.

Kim and her husband, who are of humble means, had long hoped to somehow attend Bible college. After I retold her story on my daily radio broadcast, scholarships were immediately forthcoming from several institutions.

Kim and her husband are still deciding exactly which school they will attend. But one thing is certain. After graduation they will return to Vietnam _ as missionaries.

God bless us every one. Indeed.

MJP END COLSON

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