Written by Bruce Rossington
I had begun to fear that I was now desensitized to what happened here in 1994, but as I sat listening to Phanuel’s interview, the softness of his voice and the apparent absence of emotion as he spoke belied the enormity of what he was saying.
“During the Rwandan genocide, I lost my parents and most of my brothers and sisters. It was a terrible day for me.” I suddenly felt a horror that mind-numbing statistics – a million dead in three months – and visits to memorials had not stirred in me for a long time.
Phanuel went on to explain how his own horror and fear had quickly turned into despair and resignation: “I wanted to be killed too, because I didn’t want to keep on seeing… keep on remembering my brothers being killed. It was painful. I wished I was killed at that time.”
And as the interview drew to an end, I found myself asking the same question that Phanuel had asked himself many times during those days: ‘How can we not lose heart?’
But then I look at one of my students, Gratien, a pastor in his fifties, who did not lose heart when the militia hammered on the doors of his church and demanded the lives of the 300 people that he was sheltering there. I remember what Gratien told me about how his time at the college has transformed his ministry and given him a new confidence to teach God’s Word to those who are often tempted to lose heart.
And I look at Phanuel, who found the answer to his own question and is now back in Rwanda.
Perhaps a better question is “How can we lose heart”, when there are Rwandans who refuse to do so, despite all that they have suffered? Rather than blame God for their problems, many Rwandans look to Him for solutions and recognize the need to depend on Him in a way that they never have before.
To find out more about Phanuel’s story please watch the “So We Do Not Lose Heart” video on our Home Page and let him tell you in his own words.
