Close but no cigar . . .

It's thundering outside. It's been thundering for at least half an hour. But no rain. It thundered all afternoon yesterday, too. But no rain. Well, it sprinkled. But we need rain, intense rain. Sprinkling is close, but it's no cigar . . .

Genocide and Forgiveness

My senior year of high school I took a humanities class, and in it we studied the American Civil Rights Movement, the Holocaust, and the genocides of multiple countries. In this class we read a book entitled, "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families: Stories from Rwanda" by Philip Gourevitch. The first sentence reads: "Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda." In 1994 about 800,000 people died over the course of 100 days in one of the world's worst genocides since the Second World War. Reading this book opened my eyes to this atrocity as well as to the fact that few Americans, including our government, did anything to stop it. In Rwanda, the Hutus systemactically killed the Tutsis. Tutsis took refuge in schools and churches only to be massacred there. The Murambi Technical School is now a genocide museum with 45,000 skulls and corpses in all of its rooms, not because they were moved there, but because they were killed there. It has been six years since I read Gourevitch's book, and have not heard much about the Rwandan genocide in the media since.

One of the websites I frequent is that of Relevant Magazine and it's lead article today is entitled, "Unconditional: In the face of a terrible genocide, two Rwandan men choose forgiveness and hope." This article by Katherine Carelock describes two Rwandan men, Emmanuel and Ernest, whose families were killed and who have found forgiveness in spite of the atrocities they have encountered. The link to the article is below. Please read it, for two reasons. The first is to become a little more knowledgable about this event. And the second is to read about the application of forgiveness in real life and be challenged to forgive the personal atrocities in your own life.

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7406

The Little Engine that Could

I haven't been able to sleep the past few nights and as I looked around the darkness hoping to fall alseep, I've done a lot of praying and a lot of thinking. One of the things I thought about last night was the book "The Little Engine that Could." We read that book a lot when I was little, and I haven't really thought much about it until last night. I thought about how the lesson/moral of it has implications for me at 24 years of age. In the book the little engine has to climb a big hill and he does it by saying "I think I can" over and over again and by going slowly but surely up the hill. He makes it and there is much rejoicing. And I was thinking last night about the little engine and how in my life there are sometimes looming obstacles and overwhelming situations. Like the engine got over the hill, I can get through them (with Jesus, of course) by taking things one step at a time and by encouraging myself (preferably through a Bible verse). And I feel like right now I am at a place where I know there is a hill, but I'm not sure how close it is to where I am. It could be around the next curve, but it could be a few miles off. Regardless, I know that I will make it to the top of the hill.

Hopefully I will sleep better tonight, but if I don't maybe I'll come up with something else to blog about . . .

Eli's coming . . .

There's a storm brewing outside my apartment. It's been thundering and very windy for the last half an hour or so, but there hasn't been any rain. Sometimes it's calmest before a storm, but sometimes it can be nasty and violent. And at times some people see the storm coming but others see nothing. The bottom line: Eli's coming. He may come in the next three or four minutes or maybe not until later tonight, but he's coming. What will Eli do? Will be bring the much needed rain? Will he cause wide spread power outages and fallen trees? Only time will tell. I hope that Eli will bring relief from the pain of drought even though there might be pain in the storm.

and as the thunder rolls
I barely hear You whisper through the rain
"I'm with you"
and as Your mercy falls
I raise my hands and praise
the God who gives and takes away

Eli's coming. And when he gets here I hope that no matter the pain I can raise my hands and praise the God who gives and takes away.