F
TURE
A story of forgiveness by Alex Nsengimana
I knelt on the cool tile floor of a Rwandan prison on a rainy March afternoon, my thoughts flashing back to that day, nearly 19 years ago, when my world fell apart. Images flew through my mind’s eye in rapid succession: a woman – my grandmother – yelling at me, my younger brother and older sister to find a place to hide. Angry men ordering my grandmother outside, raising a nail-studded club as they began beating her to death. With a sharp breath, I returned my thoughts to the present-day Rwandan prison, laid my hand on the shoulder of the man next to me, and began to pray that God would forgive him. Images from the days and months following my grandmother’s death continued to crash through my consciousness as I searched for more words to pray. My uncle, hiding under the bed, finally discovered by a mob of militia. His pleading eyes looking into the faces of his killers, asking them to shoot him quickly. The stick they used to
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beat him until, finally, he died. I forced myself once again to return to the present, continuing my prayer. As I finished praying, a weighty burden seemed to lift from my shoulders. My journey to forgiveness had been long. Over the years I struggled to understand why my life was spared when nearly a million other lives were not. Nights at the orphanage where we ended up were filled with the cries of children like me, hundreds of them, all lost and alone. One day in 1995, all of the kids at the orphanage began lining up outside. Excitement buzzed like electricity in the air, and we were each handed a colourful box. These gift-filled shoeboxes, given through the Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child project, reminded us that someone cared for us.
In 1997, I joined the African Children’s Choir. On tour, I met a family who eventually sponsored me to come to school in the US. In 2003, I left Rwanda and moved to Minnesota, where God gave me another family who cares about me. After high school, I studied to receive a degree in pastoral leadership through Crossroads College. My journey is still in progress, but after I travelled to Rwanda to deliver shoebox gifts through Operation Christmas Child, I came full circle in the healing process. I didn’t expect to be able to meet the man who killed my uncle, but when the Lord orchestrated that during my trip, I began to feel as though I could see the destination at the end of the road. If God is able to forgive me of my sins, I can forgive someone who has wronged me. operationchristmaschild.org.uk/idea
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