Genocide has suddenly become a theme on The World Race and this time it's a little more personal. It began just a couple of months ago when I was in Cambodia and had the opportunity to visit the site of many of the killings that happened during Pol Pot's regime. It was in 1974 that Pot and the Khmer Rouge began the systematic 4-year killing of 1.5 million of their fellow Cambodians. Even though I have realized the magnitude of those events I wasn't born until several years after they ended so I have no memory of them and am, therefore, not really able to relate to them. In November 1994 I turned 13 years old. A little more than 7 months before that, in April 1994, the Hutus began the process of wiping out more than 1 million of their fellow Rwandans, the Tutsis, in an atrocity that would occur over a brief 3-month period. I remember these events very clearly and for the people of Rwanda it is still very real. For some of them it is almost as if they can still here the gunshots and cries of pain and see the blood and bodies lying in the streets. Bodies of neighbors, friends, and children, all killed in the name of ethnic superiority. It has been a long, hard road to return to normal life for this nation but its people have persevered. They continue to remember what happened during those few short months and have vowed never to let it happen again. They have decided that they are no longer Hutu or Tutsi but that they are all Rwandan. About 150 years ago our nation faced a similar dilemma. As brother fought against brother Americans tried to decide what kind of nation they wanted to be. Even though some were determined to break away, ultimately the union was preserved and what our forefathers had established many generations before had proved that it could survive anything. Anybody who knows me knows how much I love the South but I'm not just a Southerner, I'm a citizen of the United States and, more than that, I'm a citizen of Heaven. Today the church faces questions similar to what Rwandans and Americans have already answered. What kind of people are we? What do we stand for? What does our future look like? These are questions of identity. If we want to move past the hurts and divisions of the past we need to answer these questions honestly and then carry out and apply the conclusions that we come to. We need to be who we say we are going to be and do what we say we are going to do, it's that simple. I am aware that there will be challenges and hardships along the way to our stance but the rewards of establishing our character now will help us to overcome any future attack and become the people that God intended to be.
