The power of forgiveness

This time of the year when we commemorate the horrible events of 1994, puts it all in perspective. When we see the full extent of what evil man can do to their fellow man, it makes everything else look petty by comparison. Whatever tragic events in our lives, nothing compares to the suffering of the victims within our midst. We have been astounded by the efforts some have made in forgiving the killers of their family. Ray Pritchard wrote about forgiveness, many people confuse it. It is not to excuse what has been done to you, or pretend it never happened, it is not betraying those who have died, it is letting go. A survivor once went to his Pastor after the killer of his family was released; he listed the crimes in all their sadistic detail. His Pastor said he should forgive “but he raped my sister and killed my mother, threw them in a latrine and stole my land!” The Pastor said it was even more reason to forgive. The bigger the crime the more the need to forgive! The stain of blood can never go away, even forensics can trace droplets of blood decades after. Even in a spiritual sense the mark of Cain is on those who killed. I have tried to understand the Genocide against the Tutsi; there are many worldly reasons for why it happened. However one cannot separate the spiritual causes of the Genocide. It was a demonic attack on Rwanda, only the devil can manifest such a horror on mankind. Only the Devil can make mothers kill their children, only the Devil can make men rape children en masse, it was only the Devil that could click all the factors into place that made it possible. Only the Devil could have given Rwanda a UN Security council seat right at the moment when it planned to decimate its own population. I once told a friend that I believe this world is like the matrix – it is just an illusion, the real world is the spiritual realm. A country has a spirit like a person, it thinks in unison, acts in unison, without even being instructed. When one sees changes in our world, it is because of events happening in another dimension. You would rightly think I am mad, because in this rational empirical world, whatever cannot be scientifically proven is madness. Understanding the spiritual causes of the Genocide has helped many Tutsi victims to forgive and even reconcile with the killers of their families. I do not believe that human beings have the capacity to forgive on their own without the help of God. It goes against all our human instincts to forgive, but to understand there was a Devil behind it is not to excuse the perpetrator (for they were weak-willed) but to understand the root cause. So why forgive? It is because the victim bears the burden. I have spoken to killers and they are mostly numb, they have a rehearsed script that they go through. Little emotion is displayed, just factual: “I went to the house killed the 5 year old but I couldn’t find the 8 year old so I waited for 3 days till he was hungry. I fed him before I killed him.” Yet this man wants forgiveness and deserves it fully before God. The killers are too numb to ever truly compute what they have done, if they ever did then they would commit suicide. “Forgive them for they know not what they do.” I want to learn the lesson of forgiveness once and for all this Cyunamo, the rewards are worth it. This is because we cannot be forgiven by God if we hold grudges, we cannot be healed of the pain, and we will be in the same category as those who harmed you. You are then freed from the bondage of victim hood, you are freed from the need for revenge and you are freed from the past. I just hope I would have had the courage to forgive such acts. To forgive is divine, all forgiveness comes from God. Ends