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It Takes More Than a Man
Forthcoming
Peacebuilding work, I have learned, is not something born out of comfort. As the saying goes, “Those who have walked through fire carry within them something the world desperately needs.” Of course, not only the memory of it, but the conviction shaped by its flames, made that transformation possible.
This is that journey.
This is what the prison door opened onto.
This is what grace, over a lifetime, can be made of in one single day of grace in April 12, 1994
Selected passages, in the order the story unfolds
The Cell
I sat with that knowledge in the dark. I was thirty-one-years old. I had a wife and two small children in Kigali whose safety I did not know. I had come back to Rwanda because I had made a vow. I had been stopped at a bus station by a voice I could not explain, had retrieved a document whose purpose I had not understood, had traveled north to do God’s work, and had ended up in a prison cell in Gisenyi listening to men be shot a few meters away from where I sat. I could have asked God why
I was marched to the cell, and I went without defiance. Resistance in that moment would have meant death, and I understood instinctively that while I was alive, there was still the possibility of survival. Inside the cell, there were other prisoners, all men who had been picked up for various reasons or even no reason at all, whose only crime was being in the wrong place in a country that had gone mad. We looked at one another with the wordless acknowledgment that we were all in the same darkness, and that none of us knew what morning would bring.
What else was there to do but pray? It was the final appeal to the only authority capable of overriding what was happening around us. I do not remember the exact words I spoke to God in that cell, but I remember the feeling I had as I uttered them, stripping away everything that was not essential and reducing my entire life to a single petition to let us live. Whatever else you decide, let us live.
The Reckoning
Somewhere in those months, I understood something that I have come to regard as one of the most important recognitions of my adult life: that what I had survived was not only a personal story. It was a story that belonged to Rwanda, to Africa, to the global human community, and to anyone who needed to know that grace operates in the darkest of places and that a life saved by grace is a life that carries an obligation to testify to what it has witnessed.
Can God Still Be Trusted in a World Where Genocide Is Possible?
I want to speak honestly about what faith looked like in the years immediately after the genocide, because I think honesty here serves others better than any performance of spiritual composure.
There were seasons when prayer no longer felt simple. This is not a small admission for a man whose entire adult identity had been built around ministry, around the conviction that God is real and present and communicating and worthy of trust. I had built my life on that foundation. I had preached it, taught it, counseled others through their own seasons of doubt by pointing toward it. Now I was inside a season of my own in which the foundation felt, not only destroyed but profoundly altered. I felt that the God I was trying to pray to was different from the God I had known before, in ways I could not fully articulate and could not immediately resolve.
Inherited Faith versus Forged Faith
I am aware that religious language can be used to paper over wounds rather than heal them, and to demand premature forgiveness, and to rush survivors past their legitimate anger and grief in the name of a peace, costs the victim everything and the perpetrator nothing.
It Takes More Than a Man
Despite the many tragedies I have witnessed and experienced firsthand, life has failed to break my faith, and as I look toward my remaining years, I feel confident that my character still remains intact. But life has demonstrated, again and again and in the most concrete possible terms, that neither of these elements is sufficient on its own. That the right man in the right place with the right calling still needs many things that he cannot generate from within himself. His survival is not a solo achievement, and his peace is not built by individuals, however gifted. Healing does not come to those who insist on bearing their wounds alone.
It takes more than a man. This is what I know, and this is what I want to leave.
It takes more than a man to forgive what should never have happened. It takes faith that the God who was present in the suffering is also present in the release of it. It takes a community of people who will witness the forgiveness and hold you accountable to it and support you through the days when it is harder than it was yesterday. It takes the patient passage of years that gradually, unevenly, and incompletely softens the edges of what was done without erasing the memory of it. Most of all, it takes grace that descends in moments of prayer and worship and encounter to make what the individual will could never achieve alone possible.
The Legacy
To the peacebuilders who will continue this work: the world still needs you. It needs you in the conflict zones that are burning right now and that I will not live to see resolved. It needs you in the quieter conflicts of neighborhoods and communities where fear is hardening into something more dangerous and where encounter and dialogue and the patient work of humanizing difference could interrupt the process before it reaches its destination. It needs you in the institutions of government and the organizations of civil society and the congregations of faith and the classrooms of every school where the next generation is being formed. Do not be discouraged by the scale of the need or the slowness of the progress, and trust that the small moments matter more than they appear to from the outside.
To anyone who is carrying a wound that seems too large to survive
You are not alone. The company of God and the company of the human community that God works through are available to you, even when they are not visible, and even when the grief has no words. The cell door can open. The name can be called. The familiar face can appear with news that restores everything. I know this because it happened to me, and it did not happen because I was exceptional, but because grace and the God who meets human beings in fire is real, and none of these realities requires you to be anything other than what you are, no matter the depths of your fear or wounds.
It takes more than a man to survive history.
It takes more than a man to forgive.
It takes more than a man to build peace.
It takes more than a man to transform suffering.
It takes more than a man to answer a calling.
It takes faith.
It takes grace.