I forgave instantly. Not after months of wrestling with it, and not because anybody counseled me to. The minute I saw it happen, I forgave whoever did it, because I knew with total certainty that this is what Charlie would have done.
I do not care who killed him. I have never cared, and I do not need to know their name. I already knew who was responsible: Satan. He took Charlie's body. He did not get his soul. Forgiving instantly was how I made sure he lost twice.
I am angry. What I am angry about is that Charlie is gone and he is not coming back. There is a void in my heart and in my head that does not close. Charlie is what I lost.
I met him in the summer of 2016, when he was 22. Donald Trump Jr. introduced us in Jackson, Wyoming. Don called
and said there was somebody he wanted me to meet, and I had never heard the name. My own son was 17 that summer, still in high school. I mentored Charlie in his personal life. He lived long enough to start mentoring me in mine, until I was looking to a man half my age for political direction. I watched a boy become a man. Then I watched that man die.
I watched Charlie Kirk's assassination live
"The Charlie Kirk Show" was on in my house every day at 11 a.m., running in the background while I worked. Turning Point USA was streaming the Utah Valley University event through the show that afternoon. I looked up from my desk and watched him die.
Most of what I remember is ordinary. There was a stretch of months when I was on planes constantly, and his schedule made mine look light. He rarely went home. He ran through clothes so fast that I started buying his socks and ties and shoes, whatever he needed, because he was standing in front of big donors and big crowds and seemed not to care about anything material. I was a donor myself, one of many people helping him in every way they could.
When my son needed a reference letter for a private university, I assumed someone on his staff would handle it. Charlie wrote it himself that same day and sent it straight to the school. He was one of the busiest young men in America, and he sat down and wrote a letter for a boy he had met a handful of times.
That is the man who was killed in in Orem, Utah, in front of a crowd of about 3,000 people on Sept. 10, 2025.
Forgiveness is a gift from God that we received at the cross, and a lot of people have forgotten what it cost. Jesus was tortured, and worse than that, he was forsaken. When he cried out asking his Father why he had been abandoned, he meant it. He went through all of that for you. Once you have really looked at that, holding a grudge against a stranger starts to look small.
It did not surprise me when Charlie’s wife, Erika, forgave the shooter in front of a stadium. I was part of her Bible study for two years, so I knew her faith firsthand, and I knew she would get there. She has children to raise. That is what people who actually walk with the Lord try to do.
I will not speak for her beyond that. What she carries is on a different scale from what I carry. But I have packed up the boxes of somebody who died suddenly three times in my life, sitting on the floor with the wife or the mother while we did it. The clothes stay hanging in the closet long after. They can still smell the person for the better part of a year. There is nothing I have been through that compares with what she is carrying, and I do not want to pretend otherwise.
Forgiveness, every single day
So I pray for her, and for those two children, and for the organization he built. That is where the grief goes.
The forgiveness I have to keep doing is a daily one, and it happens every time I turn on my phone. What gets hurled at that family online is the worst thing I have ever seen. Some mornings I have to forgive it before I have finished my coffee – and then do it again the next day.
I will also say plainly that the conspiracy theories are a waste of everyone's time. We have a Justice Department and a Federal Bureau of Investigation, and they exist for exactly this. Let them do their jobs. What happens when people refuse to forgive and take their eyes off God is what we are watching now: a man's legacy torn at while his widow raises his children.
Where I put my energy instead is honoring him. I keep coming back to Genesis 50:20, where Joseph tells the brothers who sold him into slavery that what they meant for evil, God meant for good. He names what they did to his face, then tells them God used it anyway.
Charlie's son and daughter will read about their father one day. I would like them to find, in the record of what the people who loved him did afterward, something other than rage. Erika showed all of us how that is done.
Christy Edwards is the author of "Charlie Kirk, in His Own Words" and founder of Carry the Torch. This column was orginally published byUSA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Satan took Charlie Kirk's body but couldn't have his soul. Why I forgive killer | Opinion
