Ready to Forgive

One thing I had to do was definitively forgive the people who rented our house - Tony and Angel. They destroyed it - cost us $150,000 to repair it and we're  not done yet. We still have the basement to fix. Their negligence ripped us out of our life and forced a new life on us. Everything about our plans for the immediate future went away.
I was in the beginning of a 5-book launch that was supposed to be huge - every single one of the books already written and published won or finialed in every competition I entered them into. The reviews were amazing. The 4th book published in November and I was in the middle of writing the 5th book for release in February and we got the house back January 3rd. My entire momentum stopped. My book tour was canceled. I rescheduled the release of book 5 to March.
Then we had to move. Because we couldn't afford to live 2 hours away, pay rent on one house and mortgage on the other, and still be  able to fix the house. I canceled the preorder of book 5 and told my readers it would be May or June before I could finish it.
For weeks, Scott and I packed one house while Gregg and Jeb put  in floors and a bathroom in the other house. Every day, I drove the 4-hour round trip with a load from the old house to storage and back again.
We cleared Fort Knox housing on a Thursday and Jeb was struck by the driver of a truck on that Saturday.
It would  be easy to sit back and say that "if only they hadn't treated our house with such disregard. If only they were decent human beings who didn't raise their children in actual filth..."
But we could just as easily say, "If only the cashier at Wal-Mart had been 10 seconds slower." "If only I had talked to one other person at church on our way out the door and delayed our arrival home." "If only I had told Jeb he could walk home from the post office that evening instead of saying no, he never would have asked to go to Walmart."
All of the if only's in the world won't change what happened. And one couple's disgusting life, while it did affect our lives in a substantial way, didn't kill my son. It was a tragic accident, as the police said. 
Forgiving the driver was almost immediate for me. I hate that the story of our lives intersected with the story of his life in such a terrible and violent way. He will never be the same person he was.
But Tony and Angel - they weren't in any way affected by what happened, if they even know about it. It is nothing about them.
And it was hard to forgive them.
I love being here now, in the house we've (almost) fixed. I love being local to Kaylee. We love our church and our friends here. Nothing was good bringing us here, but things are good here and now.
And I have forgiven them. They didn't kill our son. They didn't destroy our property with malice. They were just people who were in our lives for a season and now they're not. And I pray they never have to suffer the way that we have.