Food For Thought

In 1998, I was serving as pastor of the Christ United Methodist Church in Forsyth.

During that time three family members, a father and his two children, were heinously murdered in the neighboring town of Gray.
In due time, the son of one of my parishioners was arrested for the crime. I responded to the situation in the way a pastor should, offering counsel to the family, visiting the young man while jailed and even contacting the pastor of the family of the victims.

A year and half passed between the arrest and the trial.
The young man was convicted and I was asked to give testimony during the penalty phase of the trial. I must say that it was one of the most difficult things I have ever done.

I had to sit in a courtroom in front of a woman whose husband and children had been killed and ask a jury to spare the life of the one who had killed her loved ones.

I will always remember the eyes of that mother and wife. I have never seen eyes burn so fiercely and doubt that I ever will again.
Some may question why I took the stand to ask that the young man’s life be spared.

Was I merely being loyal to my parishioner? In part that is true. In the back of my mind I also wondered as a pastor had I done all that I could have reach the young man before he plunged into the abyss.

Yet, I primarily did it because that young man, regardless of what he did, had a family that loved him. As much as the victim’s mother had lost a child I did not want to see another mother lose her child.

What I learned from that episode is that there are many victims when a crime is committed.

Yes, three people lost their lives and the loss in their family is indeed the greatest. Yet, I also know that this convicted young man had a mother, a sister, a step-father and grandparents who loved him dearly. They too were victims.

There was a mother who lost her job because of fear that her presence might hurt business where she worked. There was a sister who received the taunts of classmates at school. They did nothing but they were also victims.

Each and every week The Monticello News contains the names of those arrested, those indicted, and those convicted.
Some are names familiar to us, others are not. Yet, behind each of those names is a family. There are parents, there are spouses, and there are children, aunts, uncles, cousins and sometimes even grandchildren that love the persons whose names we see in our paper.
It is easy to let the rumors flow and let the gossip swirl. Yet, it should be equally as easy to remember the families who more often than not are good folks who have been victimized themselves albeit in a different way.

So before our tongues wag with the latest rumor we’ve heard or innuendo that has been dropped let’s take a moment to remember that everyone has someone who loves them and oftentimes they are victims too.