Emma Woods

Emma Woods was walking with her two boys, Jacob, 6, and Nayan, 4, on a Friday evening in May when a teenager's car came from a side street, mounted the footpath, spun off a fence and killed Nayan. The distraught driver came to their aid and Mrs Woods forgave.

When the 17-year-old pleaded guilty to dangerous driving charges, Mrs Woods asked the court that he not be sent to jail. She said to him she did not want the tragedy to be the defining moment of his life. She and he have since worked together on a shrine to her lost son.

Her goodness speaks for itself. The rarity of her example of true forgiveness - in a society shaped too often by conflict, accentuated victimhood, revenge and forced apologies - makes Emma Woods our New Zealander of the Year.


That’s from the NZ Herald of 11.12.2010. This woman is not a sporting icon, or a business baron, a political luminary or a discoverer of a cure for cancer. She did not singlehandedly capture a machine gun nest in Afghanistan or sail solo around the world. She chose to forgive the 17-year-old who killed her son Nayan.

Nothing I have read says she is a practising Christian. She may be. If she is, she doesn’t parade it as some do.

She is New Zealander of the Year because she made a life-enhancing choice not to allow events to make her a Victim, but to take another path through loss and sorrow. I don’t know what Garth McVicar and his mates think of that, let alone all the people who have found their identity in their Victim status. I know what I think.

“I can’t forgive… I will never forgive…” Of course we can’t be judgemental of people who choose the path of blame and retribution, hatred perhaps, determined to hang on to poisonous memories and attitudes. The harm these people do to themselves is usually quite visible. They come from a punitive culture whose motto so often is An Eye For An Eye…etc.

Well, there is another path. It is a Christian path, but not exclusively so. Atheists can choose it, Buddhists and Baptists. And a choice, often a very costly choice, is exactly what it is. To forgive is to hold the future open for all parties including the offender or abuser. It is to refuse to pin condemnatory labels on people. It is to refuse to become a victim oneself.

How did the Herald get it so right?