On our first ministry day here in Kilgali I met three women and had the privilege of praying with them as they entered the Kingdom of God through their belief in and confession of Jesus as Lord for the first time in their lives.
My teammate, Lori, has felt strongly since that first day that we should buy them bibles and return to that house to give them to those women…so we did.
We arrived at the house with Bibles in hand, were welcomed in, and we asked the women how they had been since our first visit.
Vivian, the mother of the other two women, spoke up and told us that her entire life had changed.
Since she had heard the words Jesus speaks in Matthew 6, she has stopped worrying about where her provision is going to come from; and since she has heard the truth in Isaiah 53:4, that Jesus bore our afflictions and illness on the cross, that He carried our pain;
she has let go of an anger she had carried for almost 18 years.
she has let go of an anger she had carried for almost 18 years.
In this world you will have trouble…
This is a direct quote from the National Genocide Museum of Kigali:
“Women and children were a direct target of the genocidaires for murder, rape, and mutilation. The killers were determined that a new generation of Tutsi would never emerge. Tutsi women were systematically raped and sexually mutilated as a weapon of genocide. This was often by known HIV+ infected males. Then they were either killed or spared to suffer on another occasion.”
*Photo by AJ LeVan
I heard a sermon about a year ago, and the pastor’s words rang in my head while I heard beautiful Vivian tell one of the most horrific first-person testimonies I’ve ever heard. The kind of story that you find hard to believe, even when you hear it first-person, probably because you don't want it to be true…
The sermon was on 2 Samuel 16 and 17, where Absolom has chased David out of his own kingdom and slept with David’s housemaids on top of his house in front of all of Israel. That’s 10 women who were raped at one time in scripture, and after the pastor read that part; he said this:
“most of the suffering we endure in our lives will be a direct result of the sinfulness of others – but we can’t dwell on that, because ultimately, they sin against God alone, and He’s felt every ounce of pain we feel.”
That truth was the first thing I thought of while Vivian told us without the slightest betrayal of wavering emotion on her face that she had been abused in the genocide and had contracted HIV, and that since that had happened to her, she had been angry at everyone. Literally, every person she saw infuriated her for nearly two decades.
*Photo by AJ LeVan
I have never seen my country lined with bodies,
I haven’t watched neighbors and families turn on one another,
I’ve never seen pure, unbridled hatred the way Rwanda has.
I haven’t watched neighbors and families turn on one another,
I’ve never seen pure, unbridled hatred the way Rwanda has.
I haven’t been through what this woman has been through, so I bit my tongue as hard as I could and averted my eyes trying not to share the one thing I did have in common with Vivian.
I don’t have HIV or any other disease turning my body against itself, but still I could relate to Vivian.
While I listened to her story, I got angry. Righteously angry, but in the moment, I thought my anger was my own – that the Lord was revealing to me a degree of malice that I was holding in my heart toward my own attackers.
It’s a little disarming how quickly God’s asking me to publicly open up and share the deepest wounds of my past, really, because I JUST wrote about having been abused when I was 8 – in 1997, when genocide crimes were tearing this country to shreds for the third time…but that experience doesn’t really help me relate to Vivian.
Being “abused” (to use Vivian’s terminology) at age 18, though, does. I remember that anger, and can only imagine how it pales in comparison to hers. I felt worthless, dirty, and used; but she had been abused in line with a system set up to purposely infect women with HIV and leave them to suffer with it the rest of their lives or die from it.
*Photo by AJ LeVan
Like a number, not a woman, treated with less humanity than lab rats are afforded in the US; she was selected, infected, and passed on without thought.
And yet I heard her testify that, in under a week, God’s grace had given her the strength to release the anger she had held onto since that experience.
I wanted her to know she isn‘t alone, but what could I – a 22-year-old from upper-middle-class American Suburbia – give her that would mean anything?
I wanted her to know how incredible her testimony is, but I did not want to tell her about me. The terror in the memories of the worst thing I’ve ever been through seems like ice cream and roses compared to what Vivian shared with us.
But take heart…
Our testimonies aren’t just for us.
God uses the glorious things He does in our lives to deliver us in the moment, and to heal others as we open our mouths and testify His goodness, and sometimes the most powerful words you can say to communicate love are, “me too.”
After all, we are communal beings by our very nature – we need one another – we need to know we aren’t alone.
*Photo by AJ LeVan
So I told her about Absolom and David’s housemaids, I told her rape isn’t a new way for satan to use humans to manifest hatred – it’s been going on since the oldest times recorded. I told her what happened to me, and I told her about the day I realized how angry I was.
That day was the day I heard that sermon on 2 Samuel. I sat in my car by myself, and I cried, and I screamed at God wondering where He could’ve possibly been the night that I was taken advantage of, the day those 10 women in the Bible were abused;
I shouted at Him asking where He is when women all over the world are stolen from their families, stripped of their dignity, plucked out of their human lives and enchained in lawless systems established solely to quench the insatiable appetites of hatred, greed, and lust.
Jeremiah 29:13 says, “You will seek Me, and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”
In those soul-bearing minutes in my car, God proved that verse to be true. My whole heart was searching for Him, desperate for an answer to silence and release the anger that was poisoning my spirit, and He gave me one.
He said, “baby girl, I was with them. I was laying right beside them. I was wrapped around them. What they felt, I felt…I was with you, too. I am with them, too.”
He sent me back to Psalm 23:4, which already tells me just that. I guess I just forgot.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will have no fear, for You are with me.
For I have overcome the world.
I fought with everything in me trying not to share that with Vivian in front of her daughters, my entire team, and the pastor we’re living with; but the Lord wanted to use what He had told me a year ago to affirm her, and He wanted to do it then, so – in an instant that felt like I lost control of myself – I opened my mouth.
My pastor glanced down at his Bible as he translated my words, and admitted later that he was hiding his tears behind the pretense of reading, confirming the fear that my words had shocked him…
But Vivian kept her eyes locked on mine until we both realized we had let a tear betray the hard-shell exterior that we were used to wearing when those thoughts come up to keep anyone from asking, “what‘s wrong?”
…because the answer to that question is a story that neither of us ever wants to tell again.
We will, though.
Me and Vivian *Photo by Bri Danese
We will keep telling those stories because they’re really testimonies of God’s goodness and capacity to give an infinite abundance of spirit-healing grace despite satan's best efforts against us.
Tell your story; and when you hear echoes of your story in another person's, say, “me too.”
He was with you. He’ll be with you then, too.
