RWANDA IS RED

Rwanda, East Africa is a place of mountains and red dirt roads. There is no way you can drive from one place to another without having a layer of red dust on you by the end of your journey. Even the dust in the air gets so red the moon, when it is full, looks red. I was in Rwanda last week and, during the full moon, I looked up — it was blood red. A blood moon over Rwanda.

There is a lot of red in Rwanda.

My wife, youngest son Luke and I, met Freda, a native Rwandan, survivor of the recent genocide and co-pastor of a church called Rwanda for Jesus. On an excursion from a busy schedule of conference speaking, she took us to the genocide memorial. It was a well designed walkthrough of what made the Hotel Des Mille Collins so famous.

The same man who built the genocide memorial also built the Jewish holocaust museum in England. He is a British Jew and is married to a Rwandan woman. The exhibit was amazing and complete with an earphone devise with English narration throughout the building.

Our driver, John — a good looking, quiet Rwandan man — stood silently beside me as we looked around the grounds at the back of the building. I didn't understand what we were standing on until the narrator explained — it was a mass grave.

There were so many bodies on the streets of Kigali after the three months of murder, that they piled them all into a single giant hole in the ground. They carefully documented every skull and, at the end count, there were more than 256,000 people. I stood on a grave with more than a quarter of a million murdered people in it. A quarter of a million people.

What do you say to something like that? I can’t even describe the confused feelings that went through me as I heard the words and looked down at the ground under my feet. It felt like the wind left my lungs and, as I struggled to find a stable emotional place, I noticed John, quietly looking at the same mound of dirt.

“Do you have family buried here, John?”

John lifted his brows a little before his eyes did and softly nodded his head in affirmation.

“Pastor Troy, all of my family is buried here.”

John’s mother and father, both sets of grand parents, his brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews had all been murdered during the genocide — and somewhere under our feet was the proof they had once lived.

“Oh John I am so sorry.” I began to muddle. “I can’t even begin to imagine. I can’t even begin to imagine what to say.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, “After 16 years of seeing this and after 16 years of living side by side with the very people who murdered your family, what do you say to all of this?”

“What Can I say?” he asked.

John looked up, closed his eyes and a big tear ran down the side of dark brown cheek. After a moment of trying to regain his composure, he looked at me and said some of the most amazing words I have every heard.

“I can say that God is good. He really is Pastor Troy, God is good, and for 16 years He has been taking me from hatred and misery into a grace for forgiveness and happiness”

Out of all things I expected to hear John say, a testimony of God’s goodness was not on my list. The revelation he had of God’s goodness shocked me even more than the realization I was standing on a mass grave. It hit me like Freda's Hutu attacker had clubbed her over the head and left her for dead.

For John, the horror of the genocide did not define his life. It certainly would have, except for the present reality of life he had found in Christ. The death was real but the life was greater. The hurt was constant but the healing undeniable. The facts were a reality but the truth far superseded the facts and, like Jesus once said, the truth had set him free.

What I saw in John can not be faked. What I saw in John was supernatural. His destiny was much greater than his history.

Like the red dirt that was so familiar to me on this trip, there is no way you can see what I saw in John without getting it all over you. I never want to wash it off.

“Dear friend, do not imitate what is evil but what is good. Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God.” — 3 John 1:11

Troy pastor’s Open Door Ministries near Joshua and can be reached at troybrewer.com.