About the book

The wounds seem too deep to heal. The bitterness is always there—tainting the taste of even life’s sweetest moments. Your mind returns again and again to the break. You can put your finger on this place, can’t you—this tender broken place?

Would you like a glimpse of another way?

Could you dare to believe another world is possible?

The wounds you carry seem almost like hallowed ground. Very few are allowed to enter. Even fewer are allowed to speak amidst the ruins.

If anyone had a right to ask you to open your hand—to loosen your grip on these offenses—it could only be someone who knows what it is to feel pain like a blade to the soul and betrayal like a traitor’s kiss. If anyone could speak into your pain, it would be someone like the seven brave men and women whose stories I tell in As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda.

Their stories are not easy to read. They weren’t easy to hear or write. They were much, much harder to live. We would all prefer to believe atrocities like those of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide don’t happen. But they do. Evil is real. And it is more hideous than any of us want to know.

But that is not the end of the story. And that is why I had to tell the story. While evil is real, good is also stronger.  Grace is fiercer. And light still makes the darkness cower. And when we get a glimpse of how good makes evil bend the knee we can’t help but get a bit of courage. While shadows still linger in Rwanda, there is hope amidst the ruins and it comes in the form of men and women like those who share their stories in As We Forgive.

Read their stories. Let the healing that these men and women have experienced after the unthinkable be a balm to the wounded places in your own life. Let the courage and grace they have found to extend forgiveness give you a hunger to find what they have found and begin to dream another dream for your future. Push out the borders of what you have dared to believe was possible both for you and the world around you.

Want to find out more? Get a copy of As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda.  An audio version and electronic versions are also available.  And be sure to check out the award-winning documentary film of the same name which inspired both my journey and the book. Finally, if you’d like to read an excerpt, the introduction and first chapter are available at Zondervan’s website.

P.S. If you’ve already read and been moved by these stories, would you consider doing a great favor to those survivors who have entrusted their stories of pain, hope and healing to me? Share how these stories have changed you. Drop me a line. Leave a review on Amazon.  Buy a copy for a friend you know who so desperately needs the hope found within these pages.  And let these true stories of unimaginable grace continue to change the lives of those who need to hear them.

***All photos on this page taken by my dear friend and fellow writer, Zoe Sandvig Erler, and are used with her permission.