Last year I had the opportunity to visit Rwanda where we explored the possibility of sending a LIVEº team. I was struck by several things that happened and they changed me in ways that I was not expecting.
We drove about three or four hours from the capitol of Kigali and stopped in front of a school. Classes were not in session but it didn’t seem to cut down too much on the presence of kids. As we walked from building to building we each had two or three kids per hand leading us around.
Maybe that doesn’t sound very earthshattering—and it wasn’t, until we heard their story. Many of the kids were without at least one of their parents. My immediate thought was that they were affected by the genocide that took place in ‘94. But wait, none of them was older than about 10. So it wasn’t the genocide. What was it then? We were informed that malaria, typhoid, and AIDS were claiming many people in the area and it was affecting many families.
My first thought was that of compassion toward those kids that had lost a parent of family member to what, in many cases, was something treatable. Then I got all selfish. I thought, “What if one of these kids has typhoid? They are holding my hand. I might get it.” I was able to stop my ego trip quickly enough to make the decision to keep every hand attached to mine.
I am not sure if those kids were affected by holding my hand but I was affected by holding theirs. I think and pray for those kids often. I am also very interested in mobilizing a team to help them deal with some of the things they will face in life. Most of all, I want to see those kids laughing and giggling again as they walk the streets of heaven. They have a huge physical need to be sure. But they have an even greater spiritual need.
The other thing that has changed the way I think was my visit to the genocide museum in Kigali. When we pulled into the parking lot I was amazed at how beautiful the grounds were and how it stood out from the surrounding area. There were houses close together and then a big open space which holds the museum. We entered the museum and learned the first thing that boggled my mind. The person at the reception desk told us that the museum was built on top of a mass grave that held an estimated 256,000 bodies. It took a couple hours to walk through the museum and it seemed that every display we looked at was more dumbfounding than the previous one. There is no doubt that man’s heart is, above all things, evil.
There were a number of other things that have stayed with me and remain fresh in my mind even close to a year later. This is just one of the things that I see God using to humble and change me. This change is good!
