Never Again: the Home of Righteousness

Take a walk with me, if you will, as I travel back in my mind to the land of a thousand hills.

Otherwise known as Rwanda, this nation just south of Uganda to be a delightful place to visit.  The rolling landscape is lovely, the people are quite warm, and the boda boda drivers carry an extra helmet just for you!  (Motor vehicle safety really is a novel concept.)

My friends and I had a really wonderful time in Rwanda - both in the country and in Kigali, the capital city.  The thing that impressed me most was how organized and peaceful everything seemed, particularly compared to its near neighbor to the north.  It seemed almost ridiculous to think that horrific acts of evil and genocide were carefully planned and chaotically executed there just 15 years ago.

"Oh no - not that again."  Some of you may feel the impulse to stop reading now, once reminded of a time when this term "genocide" popped up in every other conversation I had and seemed to dominate my every thought and action.   The thing is, though, that somehow with everything that's happened over the past few years, I had nearly forgotten about that chapter of my life - that chapter of me.  Even as I prepared to go to Rwanda, I somehow didn't grasp the significance of it - that I was going to the place which indirectly led me to where I am today.

I was a sophomore in college when a night out at the movies changed my life.  I went with my roommate to see a new movie that had just come out in theaters, called Hotel Rwanda.  The film tells a story of survival during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and as I left the theater that night I was consumed with sadness and indignation for what had happened then - and also for the fact that it was all news to me.  Before sitting in that dark room,  I had never even heard about the events that were represented in those horrible images.  That felt like an injustice almost as great as the terrible things that had unfolded among those thousand hills.

I didn't realize then that seeing that film had changed the course of my life forever.  After going home and doing a bit of research, my roommate and I came across the genocide unfolding in Darfur and, to make a long story short, my life was basically turned upside down as a result.  A handful of friends and I organized a campus-wide campaign for Darfur over the next couple years, I decided I wanted to do policy advocacy, changed my major to study Political Science and international development.  Graduation led me to a policy advocacy organization in DC doing work on international development issues, then a trip to multiple countries to study development brought me to Uganda, where I connected with Refuge & Hope and decided to return to volunteer here.  

Visiting Rwanda felt like coming full circle in a way.  But it wasn't until I visited a genocide memorial site that I even realized the significance of where I was.  As I said before, the country seems (at least on the surface) to have recovered so much that genocide is actually not the first thing your mind registers when you go there.  The boda boda helmets are just too distracting, I guess.

But finding myself in a small Catholic church just outside of Kigali brought it all back in a painful wave of emotion.  That parish in the village of Ntarama was the site of the brutal massacre of an estimated 5,000 people.  With row upon row of skulls, other bones and the muddied clothes and belongings of so many victims, the building itself still bears witness to the unimaginable evil that manifested itself there.  Being there was overwhelming, to say the least, and my heart was broken anew in the presence of something that was somehow simultaneously both reviling and sacred.  Standing at the altar, I felt my mind grappling to come up with some way to make sense of what I was seeing, and only one thing came to mind and kept playing continuously through my head - the line of a song - Come, Lord Jesus, Come.

There can be no explanation, but that we live in a fallen world where despicable things are not only possible but promised, and we are in desperate need of redemption.  I am reminded of how the apostle Peter tells us that "in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness" just after saying that we ought to speed the coming of the day of God.  

That's the kicker for me.  Really - me?  Speed the coming of the day of God?  How?  

"Live holy and godly lives," Peter says.  "Make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him."  

I don't know how to be spotless without Christ.  I don't know how to speed the coming of God's home of righteousness without Christ - it's all impossible apart from his atonement and the Spirit working in me.  I know that.  But it seems as though God has again used Rwanda to make another indelible change in my life.  Because I can now say with great certainty that as I stood in that church marred by the blood of so many innocents, I understood as fully as I ever have what it means to look forward to that new home with the very greatest of anticipation.  

Come, Lord Jesus, Come.