Immaculee was the 3rd of 4 children in her family, the only girl. Her parents were well-educated and well-respected in their village, and they worked very hard to provide opportunities for Immaculee and her siblings to go to school as well. When the Rwandan genocide broke out in 1994, Immaculee was on a visit home from her studies at the university. Immaculee's oldest brother survived because he was 3000 miles away studying in Senegal. Their father, mother, and two brothers were each murdered at the hands of angry militia men, neighbors who believed hate-filled propaganda and took up arms against their lifelong friends. Immaculee survived by hiding in a tiny bathroom with six other Tutsi women for 3 months, not allowed to stand or make a sound, getting by on the meager table scraps of a pastor's family. Many times during their months in that small space, angry mobs of killers ransacked the pastor's house looking specifically for Immaculee, but never noticed the door hidden behind the wardrobe in the pastor's bedroom.
It is a terrible, frightening, tragic tale, sickening to read but impossible to turn away from. I kept looking at those dates, thinking about how I was a freshman in high school that year, wondering how I was so shamefully unaware of the horror happening in this remote part of the world. It seems unthinkable.
And, yet, Immaculee's message is about forgiveness. She writes over and over again about her times of prayer and meditation, about the solace and peace the Lord provided to her even in that unimaginably tiny bathroom. She writes about how she knew that refusing to forgive, allowing the hatred to live in her heart would only turn her into the kind of devil that was tearing apart her country. She writes about repeatedly asking the Lord to take her anger from her and give her the courage to face her losses, her grief, her fear, her tormentors. She writes about many times when the Lord gave her visions and premonition of what was to come and how His gentle voice steadied her through the months and years following the genocide. She writes about how she hopes her own story of forgiveness and the freedom she's found in forgiving will help set other survivors free.
In the end, Immaculee makes mention of the fact that there are times when she misses the nearness of God she experienced in that cramped little bathroom amidst those six other women during those 3 months of terror. This was perhaps the most profound statement in her entire story.
My thought tonight is two-fold. One, in my own way, I know what she's talking about. Certainly, I've never even scratched the surface of the horror she's endured, but I know that the intimacy of God in the darkest days of my own small tragedies is something I have longed for but never found in the happier times. Two, I hope that I would not need to know those darker times again to walk in dependence on Christ. I hope that I would have mountain-moving faith even now, in the good times. That I would listen carefully for God's voice and hurry to obey as He makes His will known. I hope that I would have courage to fear nothing more than I fear Him, and that living by His counter-cultural principles would allow me to joy of pointing many to eternal Hope and all-surpassing Joy.
It is good for me that I was afflicted that I might learn your statutes. Psalm 119:71
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