Psalm 32
Many years ago, I had a student who shared with our class that he had killed a motorcyclist in a car accident.
I was teaching a creative writing class. Every class period, we opened by looking at a writing prompt that I had projected onto the large screen. One evening every week, students would come in and quietly unzip their backpacks. You didn’t hear voices, just the quiet scratches of pen on paper. It is a sound that we don’t hear much of in classrooms anymore. Every week, the large white screen revealed a different prompt. One week it said, “They never noticed me, but I noticed them.” Another week it read, “Of all the things I have learned, this was the most important.”
We got to know each other well in that classroom. Students who thought they were terrible writers discovered the power of their own voices. We learned from the lives of one another. We grew one pen scratch at a time.
One week in particular, the prompt read, “Do you forgive me?” That’s when my student read to the class his story of a car accident that was his fault, where he killed a motorcyclist. He told us that the experience destroyed him. He dropped out of school. He developed severe depression. He pulled away from friends and family and spent nearly two years in isolation and self-loathing.
Psalm 32:3–4 encapsulates how he was feeling. “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.”
He went on to tell us that his life was changed by an unexpected display of forgiveness. He wrote a letter to the parents of the man he had killed. He expressed his sorrow for the accident and shared how grieved he had been by their loss.
Psalm 32:5 reads, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.’ And you forgave the guilt of my sin.” That is exactly what the parents who had buried their son did. They wrote my student a letter and forgave him for the accident, but that wasn’t all they did. The letter included an invitation. They invited my student to join them for dinner. They gave him the seat of the son they had lost. They made him a meal. They showed him pictures. They told him stories of the boy they had loved. And in this unbelievable act of compassion and kindness, my student found grace and healing.
Psalm 32:1–2 reads, “Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them.” My student would return every year to have dinner with the parents of the man he had killed. And every year, they would open their home, and their memories, and offer my student forgiveness.
I have never forgotten this story. It is one of the clearest examples I have seen of the image of God in the image bearers of God. The sacrifice of these parents changed the life of my student forever. They lost one son and yet found the strength to redeem someone else’s. He went back to school. He found a therapist. He experienced the healing and restoration to his life that being washed from sin through grace always offers those of us who know the depths of which we need it.
This Lent, may we all approach the remembrance of the Cross with the heart of my student. I hope you remember the God who has remembered you. I hope you will accept the grace that has been freely given.
Psalm 32:10 says, “But the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him.”
My prompt that day that was projected on a giant white screen said, “Do you forgive me?” This Easter season, may we all remember how Christ gave his life in answer to that question. “Yes,” the Lord responded. And then he hung his head and died. The church has been living ever since.
Heather Thompson Day, PhD, is the founder of It Is Day Ministries, a nonprofit organization that trains churches, leaders, and laypeople with a gospel-centered communication approach. She has authored nine books, including I’ll See You Tomorrow and What If I’m Wrong?
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