ENCOUNTER: Forgiveness

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Helping people know, enjoy, and glorify God.

For more information about Grant Parkway, visit GrantParquay.org.

Uh for you if you're visiting today, uh, let me say welcome.

Thanks for looking into our new church.

My name is Neil, and I'm the lead pastor today.

Uh however, I will not be preaching today.

We have a special guest, and I just want to just briefly introduce Renee and then ask her to come up and we'll welcome her to Grant Parkway.

Uh we are in a series entitled Encounter, where we're looking at different places in the Bible where people encountered God.

Uh and it just so happened the women's ministry fall kickoff uh uh dinners tonight uh right here in the sanctuary, and my wife said, Hey, we're gonna have Renee Napier, and I was like, no, wait a minute, wait a minute.

Uh and and my wife knows her, they grew up in the same tower now, share about that.

But some of you may have heard, because I'd heard of her story before.

She was on Katie Couric, and we were meeting earlier as a staff this morning, and and and someone said, Have you ever been on Oprah?

And she said, No, Oprah's they called, but we couldn't work it out.

And I was like, It happens to me all the time.

Oprah's people call, we can't get together.

Uh and why do I bring that up?

Because she has a story that kind of stands out even in our culture.

And so she's gonna share a little bit about that this morning.

She'll share even more detail tonight, the women's uh uh ministry event.

And and so I just want you to, you're gonna hear, she's gonna say this phrase over and over.

I'm just an ordinary person, I'm just an ordinary person, I'm just an ordinary person.

She's a 56-year-old grandmother of eight.

Now, all the men are kind of going, awesome, the women are going, you just said that right out loud, you just dropped her age on you.

You'll do the math and figure it out.

Oh, she's very open.

I just want you to know, she's lived life and she's not here as a perfect person, she's here as an authentic person who went through an incredible tragedy.

And here's the encounter today, okay?

Now I'll and I'll be done.

This is all you're getting out of me today.

Uh, here's the encounter.

What you're gonna encounter today is your own heart.

You're gonna be forced to look into the depths of your heart when you hear somebody who who tells her story of forgiveness.

It's gonna cause you to encounter your own heart.

And so I want you to get ready for that, if you would.

Okay?

And so please join me in welcoming to Grand Parkway, Renee Napier.

Well, what a great introduction.

I mean, grandmother, 56 years old, that's true.

That's I I uh he has permission to say that because I said it in the last service.

So that's how he can get away with that.

And I'm just so thrilled to be here today.

Thank you so much for you you being here and coming to to the church.

And and I hope that you encounter God today.

I believe that you will.

I know that he was here, his Holy Spirit was here in our last service, and and I don't think he's left, so that's a good thing.

And I just want to uh thank Neil and Marcy once again for inviting me here today because I did grow up with Marcy in Pensacola.

I'm older than she is, she's not 56, but I I'm about nine years older, so that'll tell you if you want to do the math on that, how old she is.

So anyway, she actually babysat my kids.

So and my kids loved her and she loved them, and and we just we grew up in Pensacola and we just were thinking the other day, you know, I I don't know exactly when we first met, but it just seems like we've always known each other, so that's kind of how we connected.

But it is such an honor to be here today.

And as we begin, I would just like to start off with us praying.

So if you would just join me in prayer, please.

Heavenly Father, we come before you once again this morning, and we're just so thankful that you are here among us and that we feel your Holy Spirit here today.

And Father, once again I ask you that in the next in the next few minutes as I share my testimony with this group of people who have come here today to hear a word from you, I pray that's exactly what they hear.

Not a word from Renee Napier, but a word from you.

And Father, I pray that you will bless this time that we have together, and that you will help me to just share what it is that you want everyone to hear.

And I pray that my heart is in tune to that.

And I ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So as I begin, I just want to start off by kind of telling you that I was born and raised in Pensacola, and I was born on September 5th, 1958, 56 years old.

And I was born into a home that loved Christ.

My mom and dad, my granddaddy was a Baptist preacher, and so I'm very thankful to be able to tell people that I grew up in a home that was Christ-centered.

And I also tell people that I just came out loving Jesus.

I don't I don't know what that's all about, but I did, and I was thankful that I did, and I had to wait till I was about eight years old.

My parents just kept telling me, well, you just better wait so you understand, to do my profession of faith at church, and uh that's when I accepted Christ into my heart publicly, but I'd already done it a long time before that.

And I grew up in that Baptist church in Pensacola First Baptist, and I remember that I went to GA's, and and GA's was a wonderful place to hang out with other girls, but for me it meant so much more than that because I was memorizing scripture and I loved that.

It was challenging, you know.

I we had to memorize chapters sometimes, but I realized that the reason that you do that, as I grew up, I realized, is because when you get yourself into a place where you're scared or you're or you just don't know how to handle something, a scripture will come to mind if you have it in your heart.

You know, because we are to hide God's word in our heart that we might not sin against him.

And so that's what I hope that I have done and I believe that I have because as life went on and I faced challenges, those scriptures just continue to come back to me, still to this day, and they bless me, and I know that I don't have to be afraid because fear is not of the Lord.

And I know that God is always with me because he says that he is, because that's what his word says, and he's very faithful to his word.

I got married when I was 18 years old to a man named Philip Napier, young man, he was 19.

And I at 19 years old I had our first child, it was a son, his name is Alan.

At 21, I had our daughter, Michelle, and at 23, I had identical twin daughters, Carmen and Megan.

And, you know, boom, we have this instant family, and I'm just gonna tell you that I figured out that that was my calling to be a mom, good thing, because I had four children.

And so that's what I just I loved being their mother, and I loved taking care of them, and I just poured my life into them and into my family, and that and I was blessed.

And I raised my children the same way I was raised.

I brought them to church and I prayed for them, and every one of them accepted Christ over the course of their young days.

And, you know, for for anyone in here who may not understand all of that about a profession of faith, you know, I I just I watched my children.

It doesn't mean when you accept Christ into your heart, it doesn't mean that your life is going to be perfect.

That is never promised to us.

And it doesn't mean that you're not going to continue to sin, you know, it means that we have, we're equipping ourselves to try to fight that and to be able to not sin, hopefully.

And so, as Neil said earlier, you know, I am an ordinary person.

There is nothing extraordinary about me other than I serve the Lord Jesus Christ.

He is the extraordinary part of my life.

And anything that you hear here today that I am speaking to you that has happened in my life that is good is because of Christ and because of what he has done in my life.

I don't take any credit for that.

I give him all the glory.

And as I raised my family, and you know, we were married for about 21 years, and my husband went, and I and I I have to say this too, because we really never had that marriage that seemed perfect or you know was just the greatest thing ever.

But I was in love with him and I was committed and dedicated, and he was too for a long time.

And then at about 21 years, he decided that he couldn't do it anymore, and he asked me for a divorce, told me that he wanted a divorce, didn't ask me, told me.

And there was nothing I could do about that, and my world just shattered because I didn't want a divorce.

And then I began to feel those human emotions, and for the very first time in my life, I hated someone and I hated him.

And he got married very quickly, and I hated her, and I hated myself for hating them.

And that was an emotion I had never experienced, very hideous.

Hatred is hideous, and what it does to you on the inside is hideous.

And so it didn't, that didn't last very long because I quickly prayed for God to take that hatred away.

And it's weird because I hated him, but I loved him, and I had to ask God to take my love away from him for him, too, because I just needed to be free of that so that I could move forward.

And over the course of the next few years, I struggled with bitterness, which I didn't even know I struggled with it, because I thought I was doing pretty good.

In my heart, I'd forgiven him.

I didn't have that encounter to be able to say it face to face, but in my heart I thought that I had done it, and it seemed like every day was a new day, and I still had a struggle.

There was something that I would struggle with, and something would come and slap me in the face, and it was just really difficult for me to just be completely free of him.

In 2000, the the divorce was in 1999, and then in 2001, our daughter Michelle got married.

And I can even tell you that it's funny because I really thought that I was doing pretty good, except at that wedding I wouldn't sit by him or his wife.

I didn't want to sit on that same row.

And I told my daughter Michelle, don't even put me on there.

I'm not sitting by him.

She and she and I, you know, she didn't do it.

I mean, she was asking me, How do you want to sit?

And I said, Not by them.

And so, yeah, I didn't.

I didn't sit by them.

I sat on the row in front of them.

And so then May 11th, 2002, came along.

And that was a Saturday morning, the day before Mother's Day.

And I somebody knocks on the door, and when I went to the door, it was my sister-in-law Barbara, my brother's wife.

I was kind of wondering why she was there, you know, and she just said, There's been an accident.

It was Megan.

She didn't make it, but Megan is one of my twins.

And my you talk about world crumbling.

I was completely devastated, as you can imagine, and just the the wailing that came out of me, that that sorrow from deep down inside of me just began to to come out.

And I just screamed and cried and wailed.

And I and I looked at her and I said, No, and I and I said, You're kidding.

And and I mean I'm screaming all of that.

And she said no.

Uh, you know, she just stood there, and then she told me, not only had Megan died, but her friend Lisa had died as well.

That there was a they she only knew that there was a young man.

She knew that he had hit them and they went into a tree in the median.

First question was, was he drunk?

She didn't know.

She said they they think that there was alcohol involved.

Next thing she said to me was, um, do you want me to go tell Philip?

That's my ex-husband.

Because she obviously had witnessed all that bitterness that I had, even though I thought that I was concealing it.

And I even had a friend tell me that I was bitter, and I argued him down.

I'm like, I am not bitter.

You're gonna make me bitter if you don't quit arguing with me, but I am not bitter.

And I and then I realized, you know, that he was right.

I and I didn't want to be a bitter person.

And so that morning when she said, Do you want me to go tell Philip?

I looked at her and I said, No, that was our daughter.

I need to be the one to do it.

So I showed up at his house with my sister-in-law Barbara, three policemen, and me standing there.

He opens the door and he said, Which one was it?

And at that moment in time, and I walked into his house, you know, I said it was Megan and her friend Lisa died too, and and we hugged and we cried, and and at that point, he and his wife had had a little boy.

His name is Chance, and Chance was about a year and a half old, and and you know, when when I knew that they were gonna have that child, I told my children, I said, you know, don't hate that child.

Don't have any ill feelings toward that child because that child didn't pick the circumstances that are bringing him into this world.

That is your brother, and I'm I'm thankful that all of my children love him and they and they loved him from the beginning.

And I know that Megan absolutely loved that little boy.

And I'm standing there looking at him, he and his father, I mean, he and his mom sitting on that couch, and he's got this look on his face.

He's wondering why his daddy is crying with this woman he's never seen.

And I had compassion on him, and my heart broke for him because here I am, you know, coming into his world on this day, and all of our lives have just been so interrupted and devastated.

And that afternoon, Philip and I uh had our children were all in different places.

So my dad, my son was in Little Rock, my daughter Carmen was in North Carolina, and my daughter Michelle was on her way to Gainesville looking for a place to live.

And my dad spent the day that morning trying to get our children flights and get them home and figure out how they were gonna get there, and we had to get the news to them.

And at some point in the afternoon, Philip came to me and he said, Well, my dad and I are gonna go meet your dad in Pensacola, and we're gonna pick out a coffin and arrange a funeral.

And he was protecting me.

And I said, Philip, I'm gonna go with you because that's my daughter too, and I want to be a part of that, as hard as it is.

And we went and we did all of that at the funeral home, and we we were alone in the car.

His dad got out to go get a coke, a diet coke, and I'm sitting there alone with him in the car, and I said, Philip, I don't know if this is the right time to say this to you or not.

But I just want to tell you that I forgive you for everything.

He put his hand on my knee and he said, Renee, thank you so much.

That really means a lot to me.

And let me tell you, God began the healing in Philip's heart, but let me tell you who was set free that day.

This woman right here was set free that day.

It was just like chains, shackles, the whole thing, that whole heavy weight that I'd been dragging around for those three years, God just took those off and threw them away and they were gone.

And, you know, I knew that Philip and I needed to face this together as a family with our children and get through this together.

And, you know, at some point during uh that the divorce process, you know, after he moved out and everything, I remember strongly feeling that I just wanted to have some vengeance on that man.

And I know the scriptures.

Remember, I was a GA, and I knew that scripture that says, Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.

And he says it for a reason because we need to leave room for God's wrath.

That's the part that I forgot, you know, kind of um conveniently forgot.

And it teaches us that we're not to overcome evil with evil, but overcome evil with good.

But I'm gonna tell you something.

I kind of thought, well, I know that God's vengeance is gonna be really good, but I'd kind of like to have a little bit here on this earth, and I don't know when God's gonna get around to it.

So maybe I should just take a little bit myself.

And so Philip had this beautiful 13 and a half foot blue marlin that he had caught and mounted, and my our son in the same week and they were in a fishing tournament, and our son caught a white marlin.

So we had those two big fish on our wall.

And that 13 and a half foot blue marlin was Philip's prized possession, and I knew it.

I gave him a couple of weekends, just in defense of myself.

I gave him a couple of weekends to come and get the fish, and he didn't.

Come to get all of his belongings, and he didn't come.

He didn't even respond to the email that I sent to him.

So, and I I will have you know, I didn't listen to what all my friends told me to do with the fish because I got a lot of advice about what I needed to do with that fish.

And a lot of it had to do with, you know, just putting it in a little chipper and chipping it all up and giving him the sawdust that remained, you know.

But I really didn't want to do that.

And but what I did do was I sold it to a local restaurant that I knew he would go to and see it.

So that's what I did.

And I will say, you're not supposed to get satisfaction out of those things, but I will say, as a human being, this ordinary woman got some satisfaction out of that until I went to the place and I saw that they'd broken off the pectoral fin because this was a perfectly intact fish, and I was like, oh my gosh, you know, he's gonna be so angry.

So anyway.

Now we're going to that Philip and his wife, Sunny, decided that they would, she actually offered, and we decided that since we were divorced, that it would be too hard for people to try to go to my house and go to his house.

So we just decided to make our central location for people to come to love on us through this time when what after losing Megan, we would do that at Philip's house.

And she was wonderful and opened their home up to everyone.

Well, that night we were there and there were a lot of people in his home, and I I wasn't really paying much attention to what was going on.

And I have to tell you this other thing that I that I forgot to tell you.

During my divorce, my my my one of my biggest concerns was my children.

And my dad, I would cry on his shoulders and and tell him, you know, what I was going through, and he would always just tell me because I was I would be like, but dad, it's just killing our children.

It's just killing them, it's killing me, but it's killing them.

And it's just it's awful what's happening to them.

And he would just hold me and he would say, Renee, your children will be okay when they see that you are okay.

And I knew my dad was right, but I but I wasn't ready, I guess, to let go of it for whatever reason.

We hold on to that stuff, and and I just couldn't let go of it because I felt like if I let go of it, he's one.

And and I'm giving in to this, you know.

But that night I saw Philip sitting there in his chair, and I walked over to him, and I said, While I'm at it, I just want to tell you that I'm sorry for selling your fish.

And he said, he laughed.

He said, Renee, don't worry about it.

He said, I actually thought about having a plaque made for it that said, Caught by Philip Napier, released by ex-wife Renee.

So for those of you who know anything about catch and release, you know, um, and so I we all laughed.

We did just what you did.

Well, our son Alan was watching that whole scene, and he walks over there and he said, Dad, get up, we have to have a group hug.

Well, guess what's got what words rang true in my head?

My dad's words, your children will be okay when they see that you're okay.

Well, that was such a big testament of that because they were just they're wanting us to be able to get along with each other.

I mean, it's like put this behind you, don't drag that throughout the rest of our lives, and that's what we did at that moment in time.

And and you know, and I really did know that we had a bigger thing that we had to face.

And I knew that God was preparing me for a young man that I had to forgive.

And I didn't tell this to the group before, but I'm gonna just tell you this.

Our our son Alan was getting married, and his wedding was planned in June of that year.

It was the next month.

Megan was supposed to be a bridesmaid with along with her two sisters, and we went to that wedding, and let me tell you where I sat on the same row as Philip and Sonny.

Because, you know, talk about burying the hatchet.

And I can tell you that I had no ill feeling toward them, and I haven't, ever since God took care of that, and he healed my heart, and he healed their heart.

And we're now a family, you know, we don't always get together, but I'm if my grandkids say, you know, hey Nene, can you come over to Papa's house tonight?

You know, and Philip would be like, come on if you want to.

And that's where we've gotten because of that forgiveness.

And we had to have a lot of prayer, and I went through a very dark time in my life because I have I've never had my faith shaken until that moment when I lost my daughter.

And that was the moment that I knew that everything that I had always believed in had to be true because she had to be in heaven.

And I knew that if there was really a heaven, that's where she was because she accepted Christ into her heart.

And yet I still faced that darkness.

And I denied that I was angry at God, but I was really angry at God.

And I finally one day just said, you know what, God, that's a big lie.

I'm so angry at you.

I'm so angry because I did not believe that God caused that wreck to kill my daughter and her friend.

But what I did know was that God could have done something different.

He could have, it didn't have to be allowed.

He's a big God, he can take care of a lot of things, and I didn't understand, and that was my I was yelling at him, saying, I don't understand.

Why did you let them die?

Why, why did he live and they didn't and they didn't live?

Why is that?

Why does the drunk person always survive?

And that that anger just, you know, continued to build up in me.

And then he pled not guilty.

We had the blood alcohol, we knew that he was very drunk.

And he pled not guilty, and that made the rage come.

And you know, during that time too, I I would get up every day because I had three other children that were living.

My dad always told me life is for the living, another thing that he was right about.

And that got me up every day.

And every morning when I would get up, my my daughter Michelle had given me this little picture that had a little picture of a little girl with her feet in the water, looked just like one of my twins.

And the scripture was, I think it's Psalm 118, 24, this is the day the Lord has made.

I will rejoice and be glad in it.

Every day I read that scripture out loud, said it to God, and I said, You know what, God, I don't feel like rejoicing today.

But I'm gonna I'm gonna hang on to that.

I'm gonna hang on to that word, I'm gonna hang on to that scripture because I know that you're faithful, and I believe in my heart that there's gonna come a day where I can mean that, but I don't know how, because right now there is no joy in my life.

And we went through that trial, it was a week long, it was a year later, and they found Eric guilty of two counts of DUI manslaughter.

And then in October of 2003, they sentenced him.

The judge sentenced him to 22 years in prison, 11 years for Megan, 11 years for Lisa, eight years probation.

And he also revoked his driver's license permanently.

The judge said that he could run the sentences one of two ways, either consecutively, meaning back to back for a total of twenty-two years, or concurrently, meaning he could serve both of them at the same time.

And he chose the consecutive sentences for the 22 years.

And we left that courtroom that afternoon, and well, and and and I was so happy to have all that behind me.

And I felt like that was justice being served, just and fair sentence.

He would go long enough that he wouldn't be a repeat offender, but not so long that this young man who didn't he didn't mean to do that that night, he did not have a criminal mind, and we didn't want him to be in prison for so many years with other criminal minded people that that's what he became.

So 22 years sounded like that was the right sentence.

Facing 30.

And so I left the courtroom that afternoon feeling pretty elated about that, and justice had been served, but yet my heart was also heavy.

And I thought about it and I realized it's because nobody won.

You know, the only way for us to win is if Megan and Lisa can come back and they're never coming back, not to this earth.

You know, I will see them again, but they're not coming here.

The only way for the Small Ridge family to win is if Eric had never killed anybody, and now if he didn't have to go to prison for 22 years, because really and truly, that is like another life that is lost in all of this.

Two good things happened in the courtroom that day at his sentencing.

I was able to look him in his eyes when it was my turn to speak and say to him these words, Eric, I forgive you.

He was able to stand and apologize to our families and cried, and his heart just poured out.

And we desperately needed to hear him tell us how sorry he was.

Because those two girls were absolutely beautiful.

They had so much life to live.

They loved the Lord, they loved people, they loved their families, not perfect by any means.

And yes, we are all just ordinary.

There is no perfection in any of us.

And you know, I knew that I had to forgive him for a lot of reasons, but the main one was because if you if you read your Bible, Matthew 6, 14 and 15 says, if you forgive man when he sins against you, then your heavenly father will forgive you of your sins.

But if you don't forgive man when he sins against you, your heavenly father will not forgive you of your sins.

There was a scripture read earlier, Master, how many times should we forgive our brother when he sins against us?

Seventy times?

No.

Seventy times seven.

And then the the the um parable about the man who had his debt forgiven, and then he went out and was mean to someone and had them thrown in prison because they couldn't pay him.

And it says, you know, uh that that the one that forgave him of his debt said, Oh, you know what?

You're gonna go to prison, you're gonna pay every cent you owe, and that's what God is gonna do to us if we don't forgive other people.

And I hate to say that I'm a selfish person, but I'm gonna tell you something.

I don't want to go to hell.

I want to go to heaven.

And I knew that.

I knew the scriptures, I knew for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and I know that I am a sinner.

I am not a perfect person, I am an ordinary woman.

God has done some extraordinary things in my life.

So that forgiveness was huge.

And what I've learned about it is that God did not, it's not, it is a command, it is not an option for us.

But God is not trying to punish us by making us forgive our enemies and love our enemies.

He's not trying to punish us.

If you've ever done it, if you've ever really forgiven something for something that you feel that freedom come to you once you really and truly mean it and you are set free, then you realize that it is for our own good.

It doesn't mean that what that person has done to you is okay because it's not okay.

And it doesn't mean that they shouldn't have consequences because they should.

If they've done something that deserves punishment, then they should be punished.

And Eric knew that.

A lot of times I share this with people that if you can't forgive someone, it's like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

And that is so true.

And I was experiencing that because I wasn't forgiving my ex-husband.

I thought I was, but I was living with that bitterness and anger, and it was it was making my life miserable, and it was it was oozing over to my friends and people, you know, because I had a friend tell me that I was bitter, even though I didn't think I was.

And so God commands us to do that for our own good.

And let me tell you, the rest of the story is pretty cool.

Because God blessed me and my family because we were all obedient and forgave him.

He went off to prison.

I began doing DUI presentations in March of 2004.

And our message is just, you know, have a plan.

We can't, I can't go into schools and preach to people.

They don't listen if you just start preaching and saying, you can't drink, you can't do this, you can't do that.

I just tell them, have a plan.

If you're gonna drink, just don't drive.

Just don't risk your life for someone else's life because you're so valuable, and so are the other people riding around on the roads.

And that's our message.

And I began doing those in 2004, and then my mom had gotten on Eric's calling list when he went off to prison.

And he called her regularly, and I knew about those calls, and I happened to be at her house.

It's about 2005 now, and I'm at her house one day and he called and she put me on the phone.

And the first thing he said to me is I want you to know that I take full responsibility for what I did that night.

We had the trial because he blamed someone else.

And now I could tell he's becoming a man and he was taking responsibility for what he had done.

Huge.

That was so huge for us.

We all needed to hear that.

So I encouraged him through his mom to send a letter to everybody else, the Dixons.

And he sent letters to my family, to my three children, my brother, my sister, my mom, and my dad.

And he told them that he took responsibility for what he had done.

And then one day my daughter Michelle called me and she said, Mom, is it a burden on you that he's going to be in prison for 22 years?

And I was like, Yes, it certainly is.

And so I remembered that that sentencing, and I remembered what the judge said.

That judge said that he could structure those sentences concurrently or consecutively.

And we got together with his mom and dad and his family, and we went back before that judge in August of 2006, and we asked him to restructure that sentence to the 11-year concurrent sentences, and the judge granted that for Eric.

And we had a moment that week before that hearing, we had a moment where we could meet him.

And he was behind the glass and we were on the phone.

And I just, this is so important that you know this because Eric said to all of us that he has this eternal salvation because of Megan and Lisa.

He found Christ in jail, and he will tell you there is no bad place to find Christ.

And he found him in jail, and he said, I have my eternal salvation because of those two girls.

Well, my daughter Michelle responded back to him and said, Megan and Lisa were the kind of girls that would have died for your eternal salvation.

And I have been never been so proud of my family as I was that day.

And that and that that the moment when the judge, after the judge did all of his stuff, my son was not ready to meet him, so he didn't go meet him ahead of time.

But my ex-husband did, and the Dixons did, and then my daughters and I, and my mom and my step and my son-in-law did.

And then on that Friday afternoon, when we were there in that courtroom, I knew that my son would be compassionate toward him.

And I knew that my children would, and then the judge went out and that and I saw my opportunity to run and give him a hug.

And so I did that, and then everybody came around there, and you know, there were some pictures that of my family.

Those are my three children.

That's my son Alan, my daughter Michelle is the blonde, and Carmen is the twin.

And the forgiveness that was offered by all of my children has just really been so huge for me, and I was so proud of my family that day.

And then the next one where my uh Eric was, he's chained at his waist and has handcuffs on, and he can't move his arms, and my son came in to he Eric had his hands out to shake his hand, and Alan pushed it away and he hugged him.

Eric was not expecting that.

And that, you know, the compassion because he's a human being who screwed up badly.

And then the next one uh was when I hugged Eric and all of that healing that began.

And then over the course of the next years, I had always wanted Eric to join me as an inmate, and I was able to accomplish that April 22nd, 2010.

And during that time I'd written my story off to Matthew West, Christian music artist, and and he had gotten over, he had asked for people to send their stories in, and he'd gotten over 10,000.

And so I was pretty sure that you know he probably wouldn't even read mine because how do you read 10,000 stories?

And I didn't get a song.

He was writing an album called The Story of Your Life, no song.

And so Eric and I began doing our presentations.

We started at Gulf Brees High School where the girls graduated from, and then over the course of the next two years, we'd were in about 40 counties out of the 67 in the state of Florida.

And then on May 24th, 2012, I got a call to come into a radio station down in South Florida for an interview, and they bamboozled me.

Matthew was there, and he had he was starting a new album, wrote a song called Forgiveness, and he wanted to share it with me and let me hear it for the first time before the world heard it.

And Matthew said at that moment in time, you know, he said, Renee, you sent your story into me, and I carried it around in my guitar case for two years because it was just not God's timing for it to be written then.

And he said, but what I've learned is that he said when I knew that it was going to be the number one release on our album coming out in the fall, I looked you up.

I googled your name and saw an article about you and Eric, and I realized he was going to be released in November, and that was in 2012.

And he said, and it's because of your forgiveness that he's getting released, and it was just all God's timing.

And I got to go on tour with Matthew that year, and the next year Eric got to join us at some the ones in Florida, the concerts in Florida.

And I've grown to love him.

I've I've now he's out, and we still do presentations together.

In fact, on Friday this week, I'll go to Tallahassee, pick him up.

We'll do a presentation at a prison.

God's using us in a prison, and we'll go to Pensacola and speak to it at a church.

And so God continues to bless this ministry.

God continues to bless my life.

But you know what?

Truly, truly, truly, I hope that no one ever thinks that I think this is about me and my glory.

It is not.

This is about this ordinary woman who just chose to be obedient to God.

As scary as that is to say to someone and the world is watching, I forgive you.

And the world was watching, our trial was on court TV.

And that was very important that the world heard me say to that young man, I forgive you.

And it was very important for that young man to hear it.

But it was really important for me to say it because God has really healed my heart over the course of this time.

And I can tell you today, and say this with a hundred percent full meaning, this is the day the Lord has made.

I will rejoice and be glad in it.

Thank you.

I said earlier that the uh the encounter this morning is with your heart, and here's why I say that.

This is the 139th Psalm, verses 23 and 24.

Search me, O God, and know my heart.

Try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be any grievous, any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way.

The word of the Lord.

I want us just to take a few moments this morning before as we close our service.

Just ask yourself what the Holy Spirit said to you.

A couple of things that Renee said stood out to me that unforgiveness is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Another thing she said that stood out to me was what Matthew West said to her, because of your forgiveness, he's being set free.

I just wonder who you need to set free today.

Who is it when you think of bitterness and unforgiveness?

Or who is it when their name comes up, you just roll your eyes, like, yeah, I've got that person all figured out.

They could never change.

That's a sign of unforgiveness.

Paul says this in Ephesians chapter 4, verse 32, he says, Be kind, tenderhearted towards one another, forgiving one another is God in Christ has forgiven you.

Ephesians 4:32

The basis of forgiveness is not whether or not they deserve it, or they look like they're ready to be good stewards of it.

The basis of forgiveness is simply this have you been forgiven?

And if not, then let's deal with that today.

Because the good news of the gospel, the good news of Christianity is that anyone in this room can be forgiven of anything you've ever done.

But once you're forgiven, once you accept Christ, once you're converted, once you become a Christian, it is sin to withhold forgiveness from those who've sinned against us.

And what you heard this morning was an ordinary woman stand up here.

One of the things you need to know about our church, we believe that not only does God tell his story, but he tells a story through the lives of men and women.

And what you heard today was an ordinary woman, some wife, got divorced.

Just tell more of her story tonight.

There's more, you won't believe.

Just endured in a very frustrating marriage for years.

Forgave that man, forgave the man that killed her daughter in a drunk driving accident.

She kept saying over and over, I'm just an ordinary person.

Just an ordinary person.

What's your heart say to you this morning?

Stand to your feet if you would.

Let me speak a blessing over you.

Hold your hands out.

Because he is your father.

God's heart towards you is always kind and always tender.

Because he's always forgiving.

He never hardens his heart towards you.

Depart now.

And be kind and tender towards those around you.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Bless you to dismiss it.