Nobody had a house like Annie and Lee Gleason. Nobody. It wasn’t fancy, or big – just a simple wooden structure that sat underneath a stand of pines in East Texas during the Great Depression. But it was completely unique; no one had a house like it.
But nobody would want one like theirs, either.
This business of forgiving is by no means a simple thing…. We say, “Very well, if the other fellow is sorry and begs my pardon, I will forgive him, then I’ll give in.” We make of forgiveness a law of reciprocity. And this never works. For then both of us say to ourselves, “The other fellow has to make the first move.” And then I watch like a hawk to see whether the other person will flash a signal to me with his eyes or whether I can detect some small hint between the lines of his letter which shows that he is sorry. I am always on the point of forgiving…but I never forgive. I am far too just.
“When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.”
On January 31, 2012, 73-year-old Carl Ericsson rang the doorbell of Norman Johnson, a classmate of his from the 1950s. When the elderly Johnson opened the door, Ericsson pulled a .45-caliber pistol from his pocket and shot the homeowner dead.
The coldblooded murder moved Ericsson from one prison to another.
Immaculée Ilibagiza could hear the killers calling her name. For weeks, she and seven other women silently hid in a tiny shower, trying to escape the holocaust raging through their native Rwanda. The genocide had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
For days on end, she wondered if she would survive…or die like the rest of her family.
Phil was in the front yard tossing a football with his two sons when a wild dog jumped the fence and attacked the middle-aged school teacher. The dog bit at his pant leg and then nipped him on the shin a few times before disappearing back over the fence.
Fortunately, his two boys were uninjured, but Phil was immediately rushed to the hospital by his wife who was worried about rabies.
A man traveling along a dirt road through rural countryside came upon a peculiar site: across a fence row, a farmer was straining with a donkey that was hooked to a plow. No matter what the farmer did, the donkey wouldn’t budge.
To the passerby, the solution to the farmer’s problem was simple.
One time during the off season, an umpire in a softball league in Colorado got sopped by a cop for speeding. He pled for mercy, explained that he was a very safe driver, and told the cop why he absolutely had to be in such a hurry. The officer didn’t buy it. “Tell it to the judge,” he said as he handed the umpire a ticket.
In the hot August sun of 2009 in the small town of Centreville, Virginia, a man stood at the corner of Leesburg Pike and Tysons Corner with a hand-lettered sandwich board around his neck. It read simply, “I cheated. This is my punishment.”
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