Stories of forgiveness are literally extraordinary—outside of the ordinary. One took place in a Grand Rapids courtroom last week. As reported by the Grand Rapids Press, Javika Wallace-Hawkins faced the man who murdered her son Andre last year, and told him, “I have forgiven you from the bottom of my heart.”

Andre was just 17 when he was killed last year by Vicente Rodriguez-Ortiz. Apparently Vicente thought Andre was romantically involved with Vicente’s ex-girlfriend. One night last January while Andre was sitting in his car with a friend in a residential neighborhood, Vicente approached and fired his gun at Andre. Andre died later that night in a hospital from multiple gunshot wounds. A jury convicted Vicente of first-degree murder last month. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. He is 23.

At the sentencing hearing last week, Ms. Wallace-Hawkins said she had to forgive Vicente. “As a mother, you’re a child to me, and in my heart, I have no anger or bitterness toward you. As a mom, I just want to hug you because I know there is something that’s not connected, that made you feel so angry for a person you didn’t know,” she said through tears.

In her statement, Ms. Wallace-Hawkins managed to get past her grief and pain to empathize with her son’s murderer. It sounds like she recognized that something inside him was broken – “not connected” – and that realization touched the part of her heart that is a loving mother. It’s a beautiful lesson in how to forgive. We honor this grieving mother who did the hard work of moving her heart to a place where she could express forgiveness like this.

An American World War II soldier found peace when he met with the daughter of the Japanese soldier he had killed.

The story ran on 60 Minutes last night, describing the battle on Attu, a remote Aleutian Island. After killing the Japanese soldier during battle, the American soldier realized they had much in common, and felt remorse about what he’d done. He had ongoing nightmares. Decades later, he found the Japanese soldier’s daughter, who lives in California, and asked to meet her. The daughter–who was only 3 months old when her father died–was angry when she first met the man who had killed her father, and didn’t want to have any more contact with him. Ten years after meeting the soldier who killed her father, she received a gift: her father’s Bible. It had been salvaged from the battlefield by another American soldier who sent it to her. She said the Bible gave her strength–implying it’s what compelled her to keep wondering why the soldier had confessed to her, and it’s what helped her realize that he needed forgiveness. So she wrote him a letter and encouraged him to forgive himself. He said he had his first peaceful night’s sleep in decades. The daughter and the aging American soldier became friends.

Somehow this daughter was able to forgive her father’s killer. One test of forgiveness is that you truly want the best for the person who harmed you. She suspected that he was suffering from guilt, and she wanted to relieve him of that. She was the only person who could give him peace, and she had every right to withhold that. Instead, she forgave.