The political campaign gets stale and starts smelling like dirty laundry. The candidates beg us to let them lead, and someone will get the majority of votes one day, but I wish it would hurry up and be done. Self-appointed experts, one and all. Having spent a working lifetime in education, I took plenty of classes from professors and read lots of books proclaiming wisdom in certain fields. After awhile it all started ringing hollow.
Yesterday, though, I listened to someone who had suffered a terrible rite of passage whose words carried lots of weight with me as well as most of the large crowd who heard her. She had EXPERIENCED the message she brought. Immaculee Ilibagiza spoke at the annual University of Mary Prayer Day to a crowd of about
2,500. She told how her life was dramatically transformed in 1994 during the Rwanda ethnic-cleansing genocide when she and seven other women huddled silently together in a cramped bathroom, three feet by four feet (Yes, 3' by 4'), in a local pastor’s house for 91 days! (Yes, 91 days) They were hiding from machete-wielding killers who were hunting for them. While in there her family members were killed along with about one million other Rwandans, mainly because they were not of the right tribe.
I still can hear her say “... just to feel the wind on my cheeks.” She had been denied that sensation for three months, and it was memorable for her to feel it again. She came to the United States, married, became a mother, and now works for the United Nations. Her message was one of forgiveness and how she had discovered the meaning of unconditional love — a love so strong that she was able to seek out and forgive her family’s killers.
