"Frida: Chosen to Die, Destined to Live." These past few days, I've been allowing myself to escape into the life of Gashumba Frida, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Quite often, I find myself separating head and heart when it comes to reading about the atrocities of this world. It's easy to look at 'history' and separate one's self from it, for its just something written on paper, something that has no immediate effect on me, something that is too distant to fully comprehend or fully care. As a result, 'history' just becomes facts or statistics, and the full flood of weight that it bears is lost.

However, yesterday as I was reading, I broke into sobs and was unable to stop the tears from flowing down my face. To imagine that the red line between Hutus and Tutsis caused neighbours to turn against neighbours, friends against friends, even to see "Christians" killing other Christians.. it all sickened me to the core and made me want to throw up. And then for a father to witness his whole family die before him, that thought was what opened the floodgates for me. I can't imagine how any human being could be so... monstrous, so evil, so disgustingly inhuman to kill even grandmothers, grandfathers, pregnant mothers, children, and even babies... worse than that, they did it so cruelly, trying to inflict as much pain as possible. Yet despite this, there were people like Frida's grandfather who started singing hymns while being marched towards death's door, who had faith in God till the very bloody end, who even preached the gospel of God's grace through His Son Jesus Christ to his murderers.

I close my eyes, and place myself in midst of the Rwandan genocide, and all I can do is cry. What horrible creatures we are! That we are capable of such immense evil is revolting and saddening. If anything, it shows how much we need God in our lives; for without God all that is left is evil and we become deplorable creatures with no sense of conscience, no heart, no soul, and worst of all.. no hope.