This weekend, I was blessed to be able to meet a woman named Immaculee Ilibagiza. Saturday night she spoke at the Paramount Theater in Austin. Immaculee is a survivor of the 1994 Rwanda genocide - when radicals from the Hutu Tribe attempted to purge the country of the Tutsi. Over 800,000 people were hunted down and slaughtered in the span of 100 days. That is more than six men, women and children murdered every minute of every hour of every day for more than three months. Immaculee is only one of 300,000-400,000 survivors of the genocide. She lost her parents, two of her three brothers and many other relatives in the racial cleansing.
So how did Immaculee survive? Her father, a devout Catholic man known for his kindness, gave her his rosary and sent her to another village to hide at the house of a friend. Although he was a minister, He was Hutu. But her father assured Immaculee that this man would never kill anyone and that he would provide a safe haven for her. Immaculee obeyed her father and for the next 91 days, she would live in a tiny bathroom with 6 other women and a 7-year-old girl sharing what scraps of food the minister was able to sneak for them. They had to wear the same clothes, could not bathe, and could only flush the toilet when they heard the toilet flush in the adjoining bathroom. At the end of her ordeal, Immaculee was physically very weak and she weighed 65 lb. But spiritually, this woman became a giant.
Instead of complaining and asking God why the slaughter of her people was taking place, Immaculee asked God to assure her of His love as she prayed her rosary over and over again. She also asked the pastor who was hiding them for a Bible. She had a heartfelt desire for a renewed faith in God.
"I was reading the Bible for guidance, to know the truth. Now I want to know step-by-step what do You want me to do. I want to read line-by-line. If You say, ‘trust’, I want to try it. If You want to tell me ‘love them’, let me try it.”Immaculee was certainly fed by the word of God. For some time, she concentrated on Matthew 17:20 - "... truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you." It was through prayer and meditating on scripture that Immaculee was able to let go of the anger and hatred toward those who were involved in the Rwandan holocaust and forgive them.
After moving to the United States, Immaculee felt called to write about her experiences during the genocide. She met Wayne Dyer at a book signing and he asked to publish her story. Her first book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, was a New York Times best seller in March 2006. In December of that same year, 60 Minutes broadcast her story to the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment