Last night Pius shared his story – a story
of surviving the genocide, a story of facing death, a story of being beaten so
hard that he thought he would die and yet he didn’t, a story of total belief
that he was saved by God for a reason.
It was a story that gave a powerful message
about forgiveness, about the process of forgiveness, the pain of forgiveness
and the ultimate release of forgiveness.
He spoke about the spiritual journey that
he went on as he moved from a place of total belief before the genocide, of
clinging to God during the genocide, of questioning everything about God in the
period of shock after the genocide, and of the gentle ongoing healing power of
God’s love and grace that means that Pius can now face his perpetrators and
know only love for them, with no hatred or resentment for all that they
previously did to him.
As you can imagine, the room was silent as
he spoke; the team listening intently to his every word. This is a team like
many other CRED teams – predominantly non-church goers, whose main contact with
Christianity until now will have been through RE lessons and maybe the
occasional Christian teacher that they might have been taught by.
And as I looked around at the team, I
thought about some of the situations some of them have been in that have
involved the choice of whether to forgive or not – the one who has spent 15
years in and out of foster care as mum serves various custodial sentences, the
one who has a radical extremist father and brother and who deny her basic rights
because she won’t comply to their religion, the one who got beaten up so much
he had jaw, nose and 4 ribs broken, and so many others with hurts and pain of
various degrees hidden inside. They are a wonderful team, don’t get me wrong,
but there’s a lot going on inside.
So to hear Pius’ story, and to hear the
powerful Christian message threaded through it was a great challenge. And
combine that with the faith-filled, sacrificial lifestyles that they see lived
out each day at the Catch Up school by the teachers who work on minimal
salaries so that kids from the streets can have access to education – lots to
think about, journal about and process.
As their trip to Rwanda comes to an end,
may the lessons they have learnt about life, faith, forgiveness and themselves
continue to grow inside. May they go home with a stronger desire for peace and
unity, at whatever scale; and may they go home with a stronger sense of God’s
Kingdom work in this world, wherever in the world they happen to be.
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