I'm not a huge movie person. There are essentially two kinds of movies I like: based on a true story and based on a Jane Austen novel. This evening I watched one of the former, Hotel Rwanda. On Friday I borrowed a copy from a friend and after a hot day at Nak Suu today I decided to relax in the AC and watch it. Several years ago I read Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibaguza (which I believe is currently in the Collins library) and it left a deep impression on me. So on my flights here in January I read We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families by Philip Gourevitch (which I will return to the Collins library in June). Both books deal with the horrific events of 1994 which are the root cause of horrific events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today. When I was job searching a little over a year ago Kigali was one of the cities receiving serious consideration. All this to say, this is a movie I've been wanting to see for a long time.
If you haven't seen the film, I highly recommend it. Tears flowed freely at several points as I watched the grief and loss of families torn apart not just by war, but by genocide. What strikes me the most when I read about what happened in Rwanda, or in Cambodia or any other number of places, is that the rest of the world knew what was going on- and did nothing- even after the lessons from the Holocaust (did we really learn anything from that?). As Edmund Burke famously said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." But even as I type that I realize how complicated that is for foreign governments, and how frequently UN peacekeepers are quite useless.
Sometimes I wonder, what is going on in the world today that we know about, yet are doing nothing? Several places come to mind that are in the midst of terrible conflict, some with spokespeople or intervention and some without, but it all makes me so grateful that God is a God of justice. No matter how many tears I cry- at the atrocities in memoirs or movies or in the news or in my own city- they are nothing compared to the tears that he cries. Honestly, if I didn't know that God wins, that he knows and sees all things and that he will come for judgement, than I don't think I could live in this world.
Everywhere you look there is suffering- it crosses the boundaries of race and nationality and class and religion. I see heartbreak and poverty every day on the streets of Bangkok. I saw it on the streets of Detroit. Every church, temple, mosque, or synagogue on planet earth if full of hurting broken people. And yet, God offers us hope, and that is why I can learn about all this stuff and still get out of bed in the morning. God wins. That's the bottom line. God brings justice to Rwanda, to Cambodia, to the streets of Syria and Egypt. I need to do all I can to fight and stand for justice now, but rest assured, what we cannot see, God can. What we cannot avenge, he will. On the last page of the book, when the last word of the story has been written, God wins.
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