The Land God Forgot?

I remember picking up this book to read its introduction more than a week ago. I remember being overwhelmed with emotions when I read passages like these:

A young Hutu woman stood there holding a child in her arms. With wooden face she described how a man with a machine gun had ordered her to kill her neighbor because she was a Tutsi. “I refused,” she said, “but without hesitation the man clubbed the baby on my back to death with his gun. Then he pointed it at my other child and ordered me to kill my neighbor – what else could I do?”

“The killers came and ordered me to kill my wife,” he wrote. “I refused, saying that I loved her. They said that if I didn’t kill her they would kill me and my wife and then our little children would be left as orphans to fend for themselves. My wife told me to kill her so I did. I managed to get away with the children – but I can’t live with what I’ve done.”

Meg Guillebaud tells the story of three generations of missionary witness in Rwanda. From the time of her pioneer grandparents, to the work of her parents under Scripture Union, and now her present work under the Anglican Church, the family has been a witness to amazing revival in the land. But they have also witnessed one of the worst atrocities in recent history when clashes between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes resulted in mass genocides leading to the deaths of about 800, 000 people. It does raise a lot of hard questions for the Christians. How can a country swept by Revival and claiming to have 90% Christian population experience genocide? Why did people go around saying, “It doesn’t matter what we do today – we can repent tomorrow and God will forgive us.” How could people pray all night, then take up a machete in the morning to kill? Why did God allow such things to happen? Meg struggles with these questions in her writings. She even raises questions about what Christian mission should be like, as she ponders about the failure of the individualistic Revival and gospel to address certain social issues. She also wonders if things would have been different if the Church in Rwanda had spoken out against injustice instead of keeping silent in the years leading up to the terrible events. She quotes Gary Haugen, the director of genocide investigations in Rwanda:

As Christians we have learned much about sharing the love of Christ with people all over the world who have never heard the gospel. We have learned how to feed the hungry, heal the sick and shelter the homeless. But there is one thing we haven’t learned to do, even though God’s Word repeatedly calls us to the task. We haven’t learned how to rescue the oppressed. We have forgotten how to be such a witness of Christ’s love, power and justice in the world.

She adds: So often we pay lip service to the God of justice, considering that righting injustice is His business, not ours. Yet he has chosen to work through us. In the same way that people hear the good news of the gospel because people preach it, or the hungry are fed or the sick healed because men and women of compassion go in the name of Christ to feed and heal, so victims of injustice are helped through us. As we step out in faith to do the things we believe God is calling us to do, we will find the way God uses us to fight injustice in the world He loves. Not all have the expertise to fight injustice in the streets, but we can all seek to be informed, we can all pray, we can support those involved in the fight, and where injustice comes to our notice we can bring it to the attention of others.