claire wibabara
The Ministry of Reconciliation
So many men had betrayed Claire, she vowed never to trust one again. It started in her childhood. Her family, ethnic Tutsis from Rwanda, fled the violence and discrimination of their troubled African homeland, moving to Burundi when Claire was a small child. But their dream of safety and happiness was short lived. Not long after the family settled into their new home, Claire’s father abandoned his wife and children and ran away with another woman.
A lonely teenager, Claire longed for love, especially from a man. Instead, she faced more heartbreak and abuse. A schoolteacher raped her but was never punished for his crime. Claire turned to her boyfriend for comfort, but when she was seventeen she discovered she was pregnant, and he too left her.
Several years after her son was born, Claire left her child with her mother and sister and returned to Rwanda to find work and support her family. There she lived with an uncle.
Rwanda was a dangerous place in the early 1990s. Decades of conflict had built suspicion and hatred between the major ethnic groups, and violence simmered all of the time. Not long after Claire returned to her home country, a wave of anti-Tutsi riots broke out in the area where she was living. In the ensuing chaos, someone turned the young Tutsi woman over to the vicious Hutu army.
The army did not kill Claire; instead, officials accused her of being a spy for Burundi, which was often a base for Tutsi rebellions and guerilla attacks. They threw Claire in jail, beating and torturing her almost every day. She was not allowed to contact her family; no one knew where Claire was, or even whether she had lived through the riots.
Frightened and alone, Claire cried out to God from her dark prison cell. She was not a Christian, but she realized if there was a God, He was the only one who knew where she was. To her surprise, she heard a voice answer, “I love you. You will survive prison, and you will serve Me.”
Claire knew that the voice was God’s, but she was not sure if she could trust Him. The voice was a male one, and she had suffered so much already from males in her life. Would a God who spoke with the voice of a man really help her?
After two months in prison, Claire was finally released, only to face an even greater danger. In 1994, Rwanda’s simmering volcano of ethnic tension erupted. Waves of extremist Hutu mobs, supported by members of the military and government, poured into the streets, intent on destroying the Tutsi people. In just one hundred days, machete and rifle-wielding extremist Hutus butchered as many as one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, often executing them in their homes or on the street.
Every Rwandan was required to carry an identification card listing his or her ethnicity; that spring and summer, a card naming someone a Tutsi was a virtual death warrant. Neighbors killed neighbors. People fled to churches, only to have frightened pastors turn them over to the killers.
Trapped in the middle of one of the worst humanitarian crises of the twentieth century, Claire lived in fear, but God miraculously kept His promise to protect her. At one point, she was in a group of Tutsis attacked by a Hutu mob with machetes. Everyone around her was hacked to death before her eyes, but for some inexplicable reason one of the attackers—a man Claire had never met and would never see again—stopped the others from killing her. Another time, Claire was in an area attacked by militia forces with grenades. She was wounded and scarred, but she again survived.
When the genocide finally ended, Claire was amazed to be alive. She knew that the voice she had heard in prison was that of the true God, and unlike the human males in her life, He had kept His promise to protect and care for her. Claire became a Christian and discovered the unconditional love she had been longing for all her life.
God immediately began to speak to Claire’s heart. As she watched peace return to her country and the people begin to rebuild their lives, Claire felt God telling her to let go of her wounds. In order to heal, Claire needed to forgive her enemies: first her father, then the teacher, and then the men who came so close to killing her. Finally, God called her to do the hardest thing of all: forgive the boy who had left her pregnant and alone almost a decade before.
Claire struggled most with the idea of forgiving the father of her child. For years, she had held a grudge and dreamed of revenge—what she would say if she met him on the street, what she would do to him if she had the chance. But God continued to bring her messages about forgiveness, and Claire finally found peace. Her desire for revenge disappeared, and for the first time in her life she felt freed from her own emotions.
Not long after that, she saw her child’s father on the street. Claire approached him, and instead of being angry and bitter, she told him she forgave him for abandoning her. She explained how God had protected her and her son (who had been safe in Burundi during the massacres). Claire’s forgiveness touched her old boyfriend’s heart, and because of her testimony, he too became a Christian.
After witnessing the power of forgiveness in her life and others, Claire dedicated her life to serving God. She began to work for Youth With a Mission (YWAM) in Rwanda, showing others the power of Christ’s love and His ability to transform individuals. She discovered her calling in the words of Paul in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”
Today, Claire works with people suffering from or living with AIDS, which is ravaging Africa. She considers it a delight to comfort and serve people, young and old, at the end of their lives. She thanks God that the cycle of anger and revenge has been broken in her life, and that the reconciliation she experienced is being used by God to help others.
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.
(2 Corinthians 5:18-19)