I opened my inbox this morning to find a story from Prison Fellowship International; it’s the President’s Weekly Message, called From Broken Pieces to Reconciliation.  I was gripped by the story of a bishop in Rwanda who is spearheading reconciliation efforts following the 1994 genocide — he has facilitated some of the program where offenders are building homes for victims, in addition to founding a boarding school for orphans.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are a few quotes that caught my eye:

From the Latin word conciliare, “to bring together,” reconciliation literally means a drawing together, a re-uniting. Or, as Bishop John puts it, “Christ brings the parts back together.” Jesus allows us to re-tell the story of our lives, to re-concile the broken pieces of that story. This labor is divine, yet conducted with willing human hands and hearts softened by His mercy. As Christians through the centuries have taught, it often involves tears, what some Christians even call “the gift of tears.”

And this is what makes that reconciliation possible…

Bishop John embraced the broken man and said, “No. You are forgiven. We have a forgiving God.” Years after the genocide, this inmate’s heart allowed for a certain mercy-won on a forlorn hill outside of Jerusalem-to unfurl; the collecting of the broken pieces of this prisoner’s life had wondrously begun. He began to understand that he is forgivable.

Like the cross, Rwanda can seem so remote. The Rwandan calculus of sin-with so many hacked to death, as the bishop says, “drunk with evil”-and grace seem to defy all categories. It is easier, more comfortable, to understand Bishop John’s stories as fiction. Both the sin and the grace-that Christ could receive into eternity any man who has raped and slaughtered-seem too offensive and far-reaching.

And yet, perhaps it is this incredulousness, this posture of a hardened heart, this shirking of Christ’s offensive grace, which requires the Holy Spirit to “break us up”; to jackhammer the cement which encases the pieces of our unredeemed stories; to get us to the point where we turn to Christ and beg Him to helps retell the story of our lives, to reconcile. If all of this is really true, it should make us weep.

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