Give Me Charlies

Where were you when you heard Charlie Kirk was shot?

If you were born before 1995, then you remember exactly what you were doing when you heard that planes had flown into World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Hereafter, every American older than ten will remember what they were doing when they heard that Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Around noon on that fateful Wednesday, my toddler was napping and I was settling into work when I got a text saying Charlie had been shot.

Immediately, I opened X. (The only place I go for live news these days.) There, I read that Charlie had been shot in the neck. Yes, but how? Grazed? Bloodied? Unconscious?

This will be like Trump, or at worst like Ronald Reagan, I thought, heart pounding as I scrolled for more news. He’ll get back up on his feet, or he’ll narrowly escape death, but he will triumph.

Then I saw the video—not the distant video of Charlie crumpling at the sound of a rifle shot, but the close video, taken about 20 feet away.

There was a reason the video was somewhat buried in the feed. Nobody was sharing it. I wished I could unsee it.

With a story-driven interest in violent physical trauma, I’ve done my fair share of research about wounds. It’s what you do when you’re a writer. So when I saw Charlie’s throat erupt in a fountain of blood, I knew this was the end.

Charlie’s eyes gently closed. One second later, his fist around the mic relaxed. And he fell.

You don’t survive when your carotid artery gets opened up to the world like that. You just don’t. Nevertheless, I prayed. God had been speaking each heartbeat of Charlie Kirk’s for 31 years, and He could keep speaking them for 31 more if He chose.

I prayed for an hour, but as it turns out, Charlie was already dead. He had died that instant. The doctors were able to revive a heartbeat in the hospital thanks to medical magic, but he was already gone and in glory.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” - 1984

I’ve seen many movies and read many books (fiction and nonfiction) of heroes who died or suffered just like Charlie: for speaking the truth.

William Tyndale, strangled and burned for daring to write the Scriptures in English. John Knox, rowing as a slave aboard a French galley for preaching Reformed doctrines. German teenager Helmuth Hübener, guillotined for publishing pamphlets that denounced Hitler. Sergei Kourdakov, “accidentally” shooting himself in the head after exposing the brutal murder of Christians by the KGB in his autobiography The Persecutor. Think about it. Even JK Rowling endures a poo-slinging every time she insists men cannot become women (which she counters with cheerful, scathing wit). And, of course, these truth-tellers are all lesser, sometimes unconscious echoes of our Lord, the ultimate Truth, who spoke salvation and was flogged and nailed to a tree.

But I’d never seen anything like it myself.

You could feel the powder keg of America ignite.

Charlie’s death has shattered, convicted, and inspired millions. We all get the sense that we knew him. One of my sisters said that she felt oddly like she had lost a family member. But there’s one comparatively trivial reason why the knife stab felt eerily personal to me.

I have written about a Charlie.

In Forbidden Child, Piper Pascal is living in utter darkness, buried alive in a world of lies, murder, tyranny, oppression, corruption. The spark that ignites her salvation is a simple act: one “Charlie Kirk” speaks out. And her bosses kill him for it. But Piper can’t get the man’s dying words out of her head, and her life is forever changed.

Just as Charlie Kirk could undo four years of secular brainwashing at Babylon’s universities with one question, one truth claim, one argument, so this man guts all Piper’s years of indoctrination with one tiny speech.

I named this man Issachar Stevens: “Issachar” after the sons of Issachar who understood the times (1 Chronicles 12:32), and “Stevens” after the first martyr. But I could have named him Charlie Kirk. It would have suited.

Have they not seen Braveheart?

As brutally heartbreaking as Charlie Kirk’s death is especially for those who knew and loved him personally, there is something tremendously, unstoppably, palpably glorious about his sacrifice. The enemy has overplayed his hand. The powers of darkness may mock our tears and taunt us that Charlie’s death will “mean nothing,” but they do not know what we know: that unless a seed fall into the ground and die, it will not bear fruit. They do not know what we know: that the grave is not the end. They do not know what we know: that every attempt to smother the light simply pours gasoline on the flames.

Have they not seen Braveheart? Do they not know that when you murder William Wallace, his spirit will dominate the field of Bannockburn?

I know what Charlie’s death can achieve because I’ve already seen the story—in the Bible, in history, in fiction. And I’ve written it.

May God use Charlie Kirk’s death like a match in a room full of fumes. May Charlie’s sacrifice light such a fire in America as may never be put out. May his truth cut the godless to the heart and inspire the repentance of every Nebuchadnezzar, Jezebel, Pilate, and Saul. May his wake cause a thousand thousand Christians to rise like the tide. May his cheerful masculinity turn a million lambs into lions.

My only writing tip this month is this: write Charlies. Whoever your hero is, whether or not your story calls upon them to do so, give them the courage to stand against a mob—and to die with their boots on. And before you can write a Charlie, you must be a Charlie.

Cheers,
Gwen