Caring about something beyond yourself

Ann Voskamp writes:

If we go through the world with our ear to the ground, with our ear pressed up against people’s words, listening for heartbeats, listening for the heartbeat of stories, it could happen — Stories are keys that release you out of yourself and into the wide freedom of caring about something beyond yourself.

Ann is in Rwanda. She tells us about Agnes.

I touch her arm. She is warm. She was 18. When the genocide began it’s bloody howl, she heard they were coming for her, for all of them, coming with machetes glistening brazen in broad daylight.

“So we ran to the wilderness. We escaped to the wilderness. We could not make fires to cook food or they will find us and kill us.” Agnes’ eyes hold mine. It is a thing to be in a room and look into eyes looking back at you and feel the tremor of such words reverberate your bones.

“We hid in the grass. At night we scratch at the earth, to try to find roots to eat. Roots to fill our mouths. We cup swamp water to our mouths. There are 12 of us, 12 in our family. We dig at night for anything in the dirt to eat raw. But there isn’t enough food in the wilderness.”

Read more here.

Living what we believe

Ann Voskamp writes that

The opposite of really living isn’t really dying — but not really caring. The opposite of really believing isn’t really believing nothing — but not really caring. The opposite of really being human isn’t really when you stop breathing — but when you stop caring.

Ann and her girls are in Amsterdam on a layover to Rwanda. They take time to visit Anne Frank's house. Ann's daughter asks,

“Nothing like this would ever happen now, right, Mom?”

Our little girl’s standing in the room of another little girl who was hunted down like an animal.

I want to tell Shalom, No —- no, the world would never close their eyes again, we would never let anything like this happen again. The lie of it burns like an ember up my throat.

All I can do is cup her face.

ISIS is going house to house in northern Iraq. Rebekah reads the text word for word from missionaries who saw it, who testify. How ISIS is calling out children. Yelling at them to recant Jesus. And if they don’t recant Jesus, their parents are forced to witness the sharp edge of a blade lift their child’s thin neck from their quaking shoulders.

Ann and girls then arrive in Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in six weeks. Tthat means the daily killing rate during the Rwandan Genocide was at least 5 times that of the Nazi death camps.

Ann writes:

Whenever we demonize and dehumanize anybody, we can legitimize anything.

And whenever we want to break the bonds of prejudice and injustice and indifference, we begin by breaking a loaf of bread together.

“So the Hutus saw the Tutsis as these snakes, these cockroaches, as less than, as inferior, and the Tutsis all over the country, they ran to the churches.” He points to the pulpit we’re standing in front of.

“They thought the churches were safe places. They thought the people of the church would save them, protect them. But the churches called the Hutus to say the Tutsis are here now, come kill them.”

Read more here, and also view some incredible photos.

Some survivors of the Rwandan Genocide

Thanks to Ann Voskamp for reposting this