Immaculee Ilibaguza: Left To Tell

525 2 minutes read

Before we take a look at our next “Ray of Hope”, let us stop for a while and pray a prayer that I’m sure we’ve all prayer over and over, and probably still to pray – so much so, that it is prayed many times in auto-pilot mode. But as we pray it now, I’d like to challenge us all to pray it from the depth of our being. Let us first ask God for the grace, through His Holy Spirit, to mean and to live what we pray.

Heavenly Father, we have prayed this pray countless times and often not taking the time to ponder on what we pray; to mean what we pray; to live what we pray. This time Lord, as we pray this prayer, please grant us the grace, through Your Holy Spirit, to mean what we pray; to live what we pray; to become what we pray as we bow before you praying the prayer that you thought us:-

Our Father who art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done on earth, as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass against us; (pause)
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil.
AMEN!

Immaculee Ilibagiza Left To Tell

Immaculee Ilibagiza was born in 1972 and is a Rwandan author and inspirational speaker. She is also a Roman Catholic and Tutsi. Her first book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (2006), is an autobiographical work detailing how she made it through throughout the Rwandan Genocide. She was included on PBS on one of Wayne Dyer’s programs, as well as on a December 3, 2006 section of 60 Minutes (which re-aired on July 1, 2007).

In her book Left To Tell Immaculee recounts her experience during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. She survived, hidden for 91 days with seven other women in a little restroom, no larger than 3 feet (0.91 m) long and 4 feet (1.2 m) broad. The restroom was concealed in a room behind a closet in the home of a Hutu pastor.

Throughout the genocide, most of Immaculee’s family were killed by Hutu Interahamwe soldiers including her mother, her father, and her 2 siblings Damascene and Vianney. Only one other member of her family survived the massacre where close to 1,000,000 Tutsis were slaughtered; that was her sibling Aimable, who was out of the country in Senegal at the time and did not know what was happening at home.

In Left To Tell Immaculee shares how her Roman Catholic faith assisted her with her awful experience, and explains her eventual mercy and compassion towards those who killed her family.

Immaculee talks all over the world and is the recipient of the 2007 Mahatma Gandhi Reconciliation and Peace Award. In 2012 she was the June 9 speaker for the Robert E. and Bonnie Cone Hooper Plenary Address of the Christian Scholars Conference at Lipscomb University.