Erika Kirk, widow of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, said she forgives her husband’s alleged killer.
“That man, that young man… I forgive him,” Kirk said, wiping away tears as the audience present at Kirk’s memorial at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, erupted in applause on Sunday.
“I forgive him because that’s what Christ did and what Charlie would do,” she said. “The response to hate is not hate. The response we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
Last week, prosecutors filed murder charges against 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. Authorities said Robinson admitted shooting Kirk to his roommate, saying in a text message: “I’m already fed up with his hate.”
Erika Kirk, 36, and mother of two young children, tearfully described the moment she saw her husband’s body at the hospital in Utah, hours after he had been shot in the neck while debating with university students at Utah Valley University.
“I saw the wound that took his life… I felt shock, horror, and a pain I didn’t even know existed,” Kirk said. “But even in death, I could see the man I loved. I saw the single gray hair on the side of his head that I never told him about. I also saw the slightest smile on his lips. That revealed to me God’s great mercy in this tragedy. When I saw that, it told me that Charlie did not suffer.”
Speaking to tens of thousands of people in the stadium, Kirk said she found comfort in prayer and also in the way people reacted to her husband’s death.
“We didn’t see violence, we didn’t see riots. We didn’t see revolution. Instead, we saw what my husband always prayed to see in this country: we saw a revival. We saw people opening the Bible for the first time in a decade,” she said, encouraging people to keep doing so.
“Pray again, read the Bible again, go to church next Sunday and the one after, and free yourselves from the temptations and chains of this world,” Kirk said.
Her comments strongly contrasted with those of the vice president and the president, who ended their speeches. Vice President Vance said that “evil still walks among us” and that society “should not ignore it for a false moment of kumbaya.” President Trump said: “I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them”.
Emphasis on Family
Kirk had another message for the crowd, saying that “Charlie’s greatest cause in life was to try to revive the American family.”
“When he spoke to young people, he was always eager to tell them about God’s vision for marriage and how, if they simply dared to live it, it would enrich every part of their lives the same way it enriched ours,” she said.
She told the men in the audience to follow her husband’s example in a Christian marriage, where they are the spiritual heads of the family, who love and lead their wives and protect their children.
“Please, be leaders worth following,” Kirk said. “Your wife is not your servant. Your wife is not your employee. Your wife is not your slave. She is your helper. You are not rivals. You are one flesh, working together for the glory of God.”
Kirk compared her husband to a martyr who died doing God’s will. She said that, although her husband died too soon, “he was ready to die, he left this world without regrets” because he had done “100% of what he wanted to do every day.”
“He died with unfinished work, but not unfinished business,” Kirk said.
Last week, Kirk was named the new CEO of Turning Point USA, the right-wing youth organization founded by her late husband.
Source: npr.org by Fatma Tanis