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Free to Forgive
Many years after impulsively taking a young man's life, Jone Savou learned that his own son had been brutally murdered. Could he now forgive his son's murderers?
When Jone Savou took the life of a young man in 1979 he gave little thought to the pain his action would cause the man’s family, and he certainly never dreamed that one day he too would experience that same pain.
Jone was a different person back then. He had already been sent to prison on four separate occasions when he was convicted again, this time of manslaughter, and given a seven-year sentence. His last stint in prison gave Jone the opportunity to hear about Jesus Christ and see life from a different perspective.
Upon his release from prison, he devoted his life to God and began volunteering with Prison Fellowship Fiji, who had helped him develop his new faith while he had been incarcerated. He also began working as a monitor for the Community Christian School, which provides literacy and other educational classes for inmates in the Nasinu Prison in cooperation with PF Fiji. “I threw myself wholeheartedly into the prison ministry,” Jone explains. “My Christian growth progressed in leaps and bounds as I did the will of the Lord.”
Jone’s faith and service for these past several years would help prepare him for a tragedy that no one should have to bear. Late one Saturday night in April, Jone received word that his 22-year-old son, Sisaro, had been brutally murdered. An avid Rugby fan, Sisaro, had gotten into a heated argument at a local hang-out about that day’s game in which Fiji lost to England. The fight got out of control, and Sisaro was beaten to death.
Jone had a deep love for Sisaro and he recognizes that it will be difficult to fully recover from his loss. “Now I know how it feels to lose a loved one in tragic circumstances,” he says, remembering his own crime that took place nearly 28 years ago. Yet in the midst of his overwhelming grief, Jone could also feel forgiveness for those charged with his son’s death. “I who had then stood in great need of forgiveness was now ready to forgive those who had taken the life of my son,” he says. Pulling his younger son to his side, Jone says they knelt together and prayed to God, thanking Him “for loaning us Sisaro for the first 22 years of his life.”
Three people were arrested and charged with Sisaro’s murder. Jone has already made a request to the prison administration to visit them, because he says he wants to “reaffirm that I do not hold any grudges, bitterness or animosity towards them in any way whatsoever. I want them to know the love God has shed abroad in my heart.”
