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Immaculée Ilibagiza Quotes
born 1972 Rwanda
Immaculée Ilibagiza is a Rwandan-born author and speaker, and a survivor of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. She is best known for her memoir Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (2006), a New York Times bestseller translated into fifteen languages, and for her message of faith and forgiveness, which she has delivered to audiences around the world.
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Then Jesus spoke: 'Mountains are moved with faith, Immaculate, but if faith were easy, all the mountains would be gone.
Faith moves mountains, if faith were easy there would be no mountains.
Mom, think of all the good things that could happen to us instead of dwelling on what might go wrong," I urged her unsuccessfully.
Forgiving the men who killed my parents and brother was a process, a journey into deeper and deeper prayer.
I realized that my battle to survive this war would have to be fought inside of me.
We carried on like that through letters and phone calls for the next two years. And things didn’t change when Aimable graduated as a doctor of veterinary medicine.
"The love of a single heart can make a world of difference..."
In Rwanda, nobody wants to see what we saw. If things are working, we want them to keep going.
"...it is a way of learning lessons from what has happened."
For Tutsi to be able to forgive is an individual matter, at the level of the heart.
Author says her father was so diplomatic that when people came to him for solutions, people not only accepted them, but they believed they thought of them.
Never refuse any who ask you for help; if your pockets are empty, give them hope. Your every action must be born of kindness, your every word spoken with love. Live as God would have you live, and others will be inspired to do the same.
This is the same power that I feel propelling me forward into the next phase of my life. God saved my soul and spared my life for a reason: He left me to tell my story to others and show as many people as possible the healing power of His love and forgiveness.
The more I prayed, the more aware I became that, in order to receive God's true blessing, my heart had to be ready to receive His love. But how could He enter my heart when it was holding so much anger and hatred?
They can only kill us once.
The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as "snakes" or "roaches". This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image.
I knew that my heart and mind would always be tempted to feel anger--to find blame and hate. But I resolved that when the negative feelings came upon me, I wouldn't wait for them to grow or fester. I would always turn immediately to the Source of all true power: I would turn to God and let His love and forgiveness protect and save me.
On forgiving the killers of her family. A Survivor's Story: Immaculée Ilibagiza's passage to forgiveness America Magazine (November 23, 2009)
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