Real Power in Mulligans
Seriously? How can someone derive power from mulligans?
Just ask Debbie Baigrie and Ian Manuel of Tampa, Florida. You may have read the story or seen it on the news five months ago when Ian was released from prison with Debbie’s help. Twenty-six years earlier Ian, then barely 13, had shot Debbie in the face as part of a gang initiation.
Ian’s first mulligan was given the following year at Christmas. Small, scared and abused in prison, and facing life without parole, he called Debbie collect to apologize and wish her a Merry Christmas. She accepted the call. Friends called her crazy for doing so.
Then he started writing her from prison. She kept all the letters (mulligans number 2 through who knows?). Eventually, she wrote back.
The next mulligan came when the Supreme Court threw out life-without-parole sentences for juveniles who had not been convicted of murder (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/politics/18court.html). Debbie Advocated for his early release and urged mercy at his re-sentencing hearing…to no avail—a 65-year sentence was handed down anyway.
Before his release was finally secured, Ian completed his G.E.D. and wrote poems which Debbie posted on her Facebook page (countless more mulligans). I submit that only a powerful human being could persevere beyond ten-years of surgeries and the emotional shock of her experience and behave in this manner. That power came piece-by-piece as she reached inside to grant mulligan after mulligan to someone most would consider unworthy of forgiveness.
Forever free from a toxic and bitter lifetime of holding a grudge, a powerful Debbie Bairgrie greeted Ian with a warm embrace and took him out for pizza. She may not even be aware of the power she both gained for herself and instilled in Ian Manuel, but this is how she framed it for Today:
“We all make mistakes, we all try our best, and life is so short. And if anybody knows how your life can be gone in one minute, it’s me. I understand that. We have to forgive, because if helps us heal.”
Over pizza they talked about their lives and his plans for the future—a future he now has thanks to the power of mulligans!
