Genocide and Grace

I'm blogging from my apartment's living room, and I just finished watching Hotel Rwanda the movie (and every special feature offered)for the first time. I was shocked by the film and deeply moved by Paul Rusesabagina's story. He saved 1,268 Rwandans during horrible genocide in 1994 using his status of assistant manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Rwanda. The film was released in 2004, so I'm sure many of y'all have seen it. If you haven't, like I hadn't before tonight, please watch it.

While watching the real Paul Rusesabagina tell parts of his story on a special feature, my mind flashed back to the day I stood in the Choeng Ek Killing Fields Museum in Cambodia, listening to my friend Kyle tell his personal account of surviving the Khmer Rouge. Then, I thought of the trip I will soon take to Poland for a study abroad. The group I am with may get the opportunity to visit the Auschwitz-Berkinau State Museum in modern south Poland. This is the site of one of the most well-known Nazi concentration and extermination camps from WWII. I also remembered some of the ghastly sites I saw during my visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

It is so difficult to believe that:

1) These three genocides happened.
2) Many more genocides have occurrd around the world.
3) If people, for whatever reason, were unaware of and/or uninterested in these three genocides in the past, there may be some happening today.


Those are three very sobering thoughts.

I'm going to transition from the hatred of genocide to the topic of my own heart. How many times do I get angry with someone and don't forgive them? Track with me. A pastor said this morning that sometimes, even after the God of the Bible says to forgive- that he is the Judge- it is easy to say, "No, thanks. I am not going to do that. I want to let this offense steep for a while." I agree that this is easy to say. I am often tempted by the wound-licking act of refusing to extend mercy. But when I give into unforgiveness, I forget the rich mercy shown to me by Jesus and many other people in my life.

When I see evil in this world, I will react in one way or another. My reaction to Hotel Rwanda was a blend of anger, shocked fear towards the depth of man's sinful condition, and the hope of what a righteous man can be used to do. When I was at the Choeng Ek Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I had a bit of a momentary crisis of faith that I think relates to the anger I felt during Hotel Rwanda. Suprisingly, this moment didn't happen while I walked on a path surrounded by divots in the ground that had once served as mass graves for thousands of innocent people. It didn't come when I saw victims' old clothes, shoes, and strips of cloth that had been used as blindfolds. The crisis came when I read a display describing the top men in the hierarchy of the deadly Khmer Rouge.

One man, Kang Kek Iew, was photographed with his communist title, Comrade Duch, typed below his picture. This man oversaw the systematic torture and murder of some 17,000 Cambodians in the S-21 prison in the mid 1970's. Near the end of his short biography, I read that after dropping off the authorities' radar when his work with the Khmer Rouge was complete, he became a born-again Christian. Wait. If this is true, and only God knows this man's heart, then according to what I believe, this man will be in Heaven with me one day. This man. This man who helped fill the mass graves I just stared into. Forgiven? Aquitted by God?

I remember becoming confused and angry with God. I stepped outside the museum for a moment and wrestled with the questions, "How could he let this man just be washed of all the penalty of his sins? How is his soul's 'crimson stain' of murdering masses of innocent people 'washed white as snow'?"

Then it hit me like a painful migrane. Grace.

My brain was racked trying to wrap my mind around the weight of this new realization of Jesus. His grace and mercy is given to absolutely ANY person who repents and trusts in him for salvation from the wrath of God. His death on the cross paid the debt of ANY and all sin. In that moment, I realized my dwarfed theology. Before that moment, I would never have said consciously that I think some people are forgivable while others are unforgivable. However, that is exactly where my anger at God sprang from after reading about Kang Kek Iew's conversion. Grace is much weightier than I thought.

Not that Iew's conversion brought his 17,000 victims back to life. Not that it righted the traumatizing effect of the man's crimes in the least. But, as I reflect on the movie I just watched and the evil I have seen in the world, I am also reminded of the only source of grace that can cover the penalty of sin in a person's life.

"If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." -1 John 1:8-9