Turning Left at Eight O’Clock
On the evening of June 20, Symeon and Samantha Izaguirre turned left into a shopping plaza in Duluth, Georgia. Samantha was twenty-four weeks pregnant with their first child, a boy they had already named Zion.
According to Gwinnett County police, a car came into the lane at ninety-four miles an hour and struck them broadside (WSB-TV, 2026). Witnesses later told investigators they had heard the driver revving his engine at a red light moments before (FOX 5 Atlanta, 2026). The impact ruptured Samantha’s uterus, and Zion did not survive. Samantha broke nearly every major bone on one side of her body. Symeon broke a bone in his back.
He would spend weeks recovering before he was able to tell his wife, still on a breathing tube, that their son was gone. It would be two more months before either of them learned the driver had even been charged.
What happened next did not make the news because it was unusual. It made the news because it almost never is.
Samantha still has close to a year of learning to walk again ahead of her. Symeon has left his job to be beside her for it. Neither of them has described the crash itself as anything other than what it was — a tragedy, caused by a stranger’s recklessness, that took a child they had already begun to know.
And yet, months later, they told reporters they had forgiven him.
A Schoolhouse in Lancaster County
In October 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He ordered the boys and adults out, bound the ten girls who remained, and shot them before taking his own life. Five of the girls died; the youngest was six years old.
Within hours — before funerals, before the story had even finished spreading — members of the Amish community walked to the shooter’s widow and told her they forgave her husband. The community went further still: they established a fund to help support the widow and her own three children, the very household outsiders might have expected them to shun entirely.
Scholars who later studied the response were careful to note it was not one dramatic gesture invented on the spot. It was the visible surface of a far older, quieter discipline — a community that had been rehearsing forgiveness in ordinary disputes for generations, long before it was tested by something unthinkable.1 That did not make them less human; it made clear what they had already been practicing before they were tested.
A hospital room in Duluth had no such rehearsal to draw on. Symeon and Samantha had no lifetime of small, communal disputes to have already practiced this on. Whatever they arrived at, they arrived at without a tradition standing behind them to make it easier.
Forgiveness did not mean that grief disappeared on command, for the Amish or for the Izaguirres. It meant that revenge would no longer be given the final word.
Forgiveness, in both Lancaster County and Duluth, changed nothing about what had already happened. It changed only who would keep speaking into what came next — the grief, or the anger.
The Debt We Stop Collecting
“Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing.” — Luke 23:34
These words were spoken from inside an injustice still in progress, not after it had been resolved or explained. The forgiveness did not wait for the wrong to be corrected, because it was never going to be corrected — not that day, not by the people responsible.
“It is mine to avenge; I will repay, says the Lord.” — Romans 12:19
This is not a verse asking anyone to feel nothing, or to insist a wrong was somehow not a wrong. It reads, instead, like a transfer of ownership — the claim moving from someone with limited standing to demand justice, to someone the text describes as fully capable of it. Read that way, forgiveness is not surrender. It is closer to a decision about who is actually qualified to hold the account.
“If you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” — Matthew 6:14
Scripture never asks a person to call a tragedy anything other than a tragedy, or a speeding driver anything other than reckless. What it insists on is narrower, and in some ways harder: that the account be handed over rather than kept.
What the Body Cannot Carry Alone
Anger has a way of settling in the body, not just the mind — a tightness that outlasts the argument that caused it. Researchers who study forgiveness after trauma have found something close to a mechanism behind that feeling: unforgiveness behaves like a form of chronic stress, and forgiveness like a response that can measurably ease it.2
That is a clinical way of describing what Symeon said in plainer terms. “We just can’t carry the anger and the hate that comes with it,” he told reporters (FOX 5 Atlanta, 2026) — not a theological claim, but something closer to a physical one. Between a wheelchair, a physical therapy schedule, and a grief that has nowhere to go, he and his wife had already been asked to carry enough.
The research can describe a weight. It cannot explain why, in a specific hospital room, two specific people decided to put it down rather than keep it.
The Lane That Was Supposed to Be Slow
Samantha still has a year or more of learning to walk again. Symeon has left his job to be beside her for it. Zion is buried, not forgotten, and his name is not one either parent has stopped saying out loud.
They turned left that evening expecting an ordinary errand in an ordinary lane. What arrived instead was not something either of them could undo, negotiate down, or reason into making sense — and their forgiveness, by their own account, did not undo it either.
The lane they were driving in that night was supposed to be the slow one. So, now, is the rest of their lives — a recovery measured in months of therapy rather than moments, a grief with no shortcut through it. Forgiveness did not put them in a faster lane. It only meant they would walk theirs without also dragging the weight of a debt they had decided was no longer theirs to collect.
1. Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, and David L. Weaver-Zercher, Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy (Jossey-Bass, 2007).
2. Everett L. Worthington Jr. and Michael Scherer, “Forgiveness Is an Emotion-Focused Coping Strategy That Can Reduce Health Risks and Promote Health Resilience,” Psychology & Health 19, no. 3 (2004): 385–405.
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