Extraordinary

I love getting to visit my parents. They’re also my friends and my teachers. I love the way we can sit around for hours talking, the conversation often turning towards spirituality, church, missions, etc. I love the way it just naturally happens and how they are truly living their lives in God and so, topics that have to do with our Creator come up constantly.

My dad gave me the book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, to read. He said that I wouldn’t be able to put it down once I started. I took it dubiously, thinking that I would be able to put it down, because I had a midterm to study for and a lot of other school work. I was wrong. I finished the 214 page book in one day. I could not put it down. It is the story of a woman that survived the genocide in Rwanda. Immaculée Ilibagiza is her name, and she wrote her story in English (which is her third language), and Steve Erwin fine-tuned it/rewrote it with her in order to truly capture her story so it could be published. It is AWESOME to hear about her faith in the middle of the horrible atrocities that took place. What awesome faith! She spent three months hidden in a tiny bathroom with six other people (all sitting on top of each other) while the genocide was taking place. During that time they only dared to speak a couple of times and they did not dare to move except for every 12 hours, lest they make some noise and be discovered by the killers. At that time old friends and neighbors had converted into killers. She spent her days in constant prayer from the moment she woke up until she went to sleep. Her faith grew even to the point of forgiving her family’s killers, the killers that didn’t merely shoot her loved ones, but chopped them up with a machete. Her story is extraordinary. I highly recommend this book.