After watching the spiritually uplifting and politically momentous memorial service for Charlie Kirk last Sunday in Phoenix, I suddenly realized something.

I now know three great people who actually lived the Lord’s Prayer instead of just reciting its famous words, as so many of us do once a week when we’re in church.

Hundreds of millions of people on Earth know the Lord’s Prayer — or a version of it.

It’s a central Christian prayer that is attributed to Jesus in the Bible. It is considered a blueprint for how we should honor God in Heaven and practice good, ethical and loving behavior toward our fellow humans here on Earth.

The Roman Catholic version is:

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

Some Protestant church translations of the prayer use the words “debts” or “sins” instead of “trespasses,” but the major point Jesus was making is the same: we should forgive those who have harmed us just as God the Father forgives us for our “trespasses” against him.

I think most of us just fly past that “forgive those who trespass against us” part without considering what it means. How many of us really stop and think about those people who have done mean or harmful things against us that we’ve never forgiven?

The three great people who lived the Lord’s Prayer are my father Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and now Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow.

Erika publicly forgave the young man who assassinated her husband, who deprived her two children of their father, who destroyed her happy life and left her a grieving widow.

What Erika did so beautifully in front of the whole world reminded me of what my father did in 1981 after John Hinckley tried to assassinate him.

Before he went back to the White House to resume his duties as president of the United States, my father forgave Hinckley. In fact, he wanted to go visit Hinckley in prison to offer his forgiveness in person, but the Secret Service would not allow it.

A few months after my father’s near-death experience, a Turkish man named Mehmet Ali Agca tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.

Before the pope — now Saint John Paul II — went back to work at the Vatican, he publicly forgave Agca. Two years later he even visited Agca in his prison cell.

After their brushes with death, and after their decisions to forgive the men who shot them, the pope and my father spoke together often and met in person four times.

One Catholic, one Protestant, two survivors who were destined to change the world, they ultimately formed a spiritual bond between them that I believe made it possible for them, Thatcher and others to eventually bring down the Berlin Wall.

I truly believe none of those historic events would have happened if my father and the pope had not first honored God and forgiven their trespassers, because I believe when you honor God, God honors you.

When Erica Kirk forgave her husband’s assassin on Sunday, she also was honoring God. I now believe that God will honor her and bring her the things she wants to accomplish here in America and in her life.

Like my father and Pope John Paul II before her, Erika Kirk put the Lord’s Prayer into practice.

We, as Americans, need to learn a lesson from the three of them. The next time we go to church, don’t just recite the Lord’s Prayer. Live it.

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan