Woman describes her journey to forgiveness |
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Written by ANGELA KESSLER, Chronicle Editor
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Wednesday, 31 March 2010 00:00 |
PERRYSBURG—A woman who once felt she could kill a man with a smile on her face for the pain he caused her family shared how she turned that rage into forgiveness.
Marietta Jaeger-Lane spoke at Perrysburg St. Rose March 21 during a program sponsored by the parish’s Peace and Justice Committee.
Marietta Jaeger-Lane shared the story of her journey to forgiveness after her daughter was abducted and murdered in 1973. She spoke at Perrysburg St. Rose March 21. (Chronicle photo by Angela Kessler)
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“Forgiveness is not something we like to do, yet it is the lifestyle we are called to as Christians,” said Mrs. Jaeger-Lane before she detailed the tragedy that struck her family in 1973. During a family camping trip in Montana, her youngest daughter Susie, age 7, was abducted from the tent in which she was sleeping. After 15 months, the kidnapper admitted to the crime and the murder of the young girl.
With her energy focused on the search for her daughter, Mrs. Jaeger-Lane suppressed her anger. After two weeks, she finally let it go.
“I could see the toll this terrible time was taking on the rest of my kids,” she said. “And I couldn’t bear to look into my husband’s eyes and see his anguish that he could not protect his little girl and that was the day I got in touch with my rage.”
Growing up being taught that anger is a sin she didn’t want to show the rage she felt for Susie’s abductor.
“At first, I was kind of afraid. Would God blast me off the face of the earth?” she wondered. “But the more I felt it, the more I thought, ‘Phooey, I don’t care who gets mad, I have every right.’ ” she said. She started thinking about what she would do if the kidnapper was captured and brought to her.
“By the time it was time to go to bed that night, I knew that I could take this man’s life with my bare hands with a smile on my face,” Mrs. Jaeger-Lane remembered. “And as a matter of integrity, as I was crawling into my sleeping bag that night, I said to my husband, ‘Even if the kidnapper were to bring Susie back alive and well this moment, I could kill him for what he has done for my family.’ And I knew that with every fiber of my being.”
But when she turned over to go to sleep, she said she learned God had different plans.
“I heard very clearly, God saying to me, ‘But that’s not how I want you to feel,’ ” she said.
Instead of sleeping, she spent hours that night arguing with God over how she should feel. Mrs. Jaeger-Lane said she knew Christians are called to love their enemies, but she still felt her feelings were justified. Being in a state that had the death penalty, she said she wanted “to make sure he swung. I wanted him to hurt as much as he hurt us.”
But she knew this response was not in line with the Christian principles she learned throughout her life and she knew it wasn’t a good place for her to be psychologically.
“Finally, I surrendered. Which is not to say that I said, ‘OK, I forgive him,’ because I knew I couldn’t do that with any authenticity,” she said. “So I did the only thing I could at that point: I gave God permission to change my heart,” she said. “And I promised to cooperate with whatever God wanted to orchestrate in my life that would move my heart from fury to forgiveness.”
She still struggled with questions about God and where He had been that night, she said. “I had to go all the way back to square one. Did I even believe in God?” she said, recalling that the family had prayed before they left “very specifically and extraordinarily asking for God’s blessing and protection on this vacation.”
Worn out from the ordeal, she said she just didn’t have the energy it took to have faith in a God she couldn’t see, feel, hear or understand.
“And yet I realized that that’s what I was being asked to do,” she said, adding that she wished He would give her some sign of His existence, like a clap of thunder or rose petals falling from the ceiling. “But I had enough sense to realize that if I were to get that kind of a sign, then I wouldn’t be able to make an act of faith, I would only be able to make an act of fact.”
After some time, she began to see some of the good that came from the search for her daughter: fugitives were found, stolen property was recovered and children in need of social services were identified and helped.
“To me, those were signs from God,” she said.
As the one-year anniversary of Susie’s disappearance neared, a newspaper reporter from Montana wrote a story in which he quoted Mrs. Jaeger-Lane saying she’d like to speak to the kidnapper. One year to the minute Susie was taken, Mrs. Jaeger-Lane’s phone rang. Susie’s kidnapper was on the other end of the line.
“It was a really unusual experience. It felt like I was standing outside of myself watching me talking on the phone and realizing that something incredible was happening in me,” she said, explaining that she had worked hard during the year to cooperate with God to change her heart.
“And that was first of all to consistently remind myself remind myself over and over and over again, that however I felt about the kidnapper, in God’s eyes he was just as precious as my little girl,” she said. “Now, that might seem outrageous, but that’s the kind of God we say we believe in: a God who’s crazy about each and every one of us no matter who we are or what we’ve ever done. So I had to put my money where my mouth was and kept calling myself to that truth.”
During her phone conversation with the man, she realized the concern and compassion she had for him. Showing her concern in how she talked with him, Mrs. Jaeger-Lane said he became unbound and when she asked if there was anything she could do for him, he wished the burden of his actions could be lifted.
It was another few months before Susie’s kidnapper was arrested and charged in her abduction and murder, but Mrs. Jaeger-Lane knew it was time for justice to be served.
“I had prayed and prayed and prayed: What was God’s idea of justice,” she said. With diligent study of the Scriptures, Mrs. Jaeger-Lane said she came to understand that Jesus did not come to hurt us, but to help us and restore the life God intended for us.
With this understanding, she came to the conclusion the death penalty is wrong — no matter how much a person may deserve death. Further, she said, “to kill someone in Susie’s name would violate and profane the goodness and sweetness and beauty of who she was. And to take on the mindset that the killer had would be an insult to her memory and would demean and degrade me.”
Since then, Mrs. Jaeger-Lane has spoken out against the death penalty and continues to speak with groups about her experience and faith journey.
“I knew that I was not the same woman that I had been 15 months before. I knew that I had come into a relationship with God that I never would have thought was even possible for human beings,” she said.
She knows people tend to blame God when bad things happen and wonder why He allows them to be. However, Mrs. Jaeger-Lane also believes that God does not violate our freedoms, which is why these things do happen.
“But the good news,” she said, “is when they happen and we invite God into it, then God can bring good and life-giving things from the justice God gave with the death of His own beloved son.”
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 26 May 2010 14:06 |
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