Gissendaner and McBride, a professor at Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa, who taught Gissendaner through an Atlanta prison theological program and helped connect her to German Lutheran theologian Jürgen Moltmann.
there might be a complication with the lethal injection. Information was spotty, until
Casting aside our day jobs
as much as we could, we threw ourselves into the work, every concrete act arousing passion for the possible and throwing open the future. T is was our participation in God’s redemptive movement, already revealing itself in threats of snow. T is was, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., our “fanatic resistance” to evil and death.
Telling Kelly’s story We told Gissendaner’s story every- where and every way we could. “As long as Kelly has breath,
hope is still alive,” one documentary proclaimed. “So we must act while there is still time. Tell [Georgia Gov. Nathan] Deal he does have the power to halt this execution. Tell Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole that there is still time to reverse their decision.” T e execution was rescheduled
for March 2 at 7 p.m., but as oſt en happens there were several delays as we waited for the Supreme Court to rule on appeals to the higher courts. Hours later, those last-minute appeals were denied. More hours passed and fi nally we heard that
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fi nally, close to 11 p.m., the Depart- ment of Corrections issued a last-minute postponement due to an unidentifi ed problem with the compounded drug. It appeared to be “cloudy.” All planned executions in Georgia were temporarily post- poned and would resume once the analysis of the drugs was complete. Months later, as we await another
death warrant, someone close to Gissendaner’s case told me: “T e more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I’ve become that Kelly’s life was saved that night because of the work you all did to make sure the world was watching. T e Department of Corrections didn’t have to stop that execution on account of the drugs.” On Good Friday, I walked across
the prison compound with one of the women in the theology pro- gram, who told me that the delay of Gissendaner’s execution reawakened her faith and gave her back her strength. “It had been so long since I had seen God move,” she told me. Still reeling from the experience
just a few weeks before, I asked— more for me than for her—“What if the worst still happens? How will that aff ect your faith?” She responded: “I’ve thought
about that a lot. All I can say is that I needed to know that God is still moving. Now I know.”
Author bio: McBride, Board of Regents Chair in Ethics and assistant professor of religion at Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa, encourages those who want to work on Kelly Gissendaner’s behalf to go to
www.kellyonmymind.com to find out how to participate.
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ANNE BORDEN, EMORY PHOTO VIDEO
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