The Healing Journey

February 5, 2025

The following is an excerpt from author Immaculee Ilibagiza’s book “A Blessing in Disguise: Miracles of the Seven Sorrows Rosary.” Her first book, “Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust” was an international bestseller:

“I am a survivor of the genocide, which devastated my beautiful homeland of Rwanda. I was a 24-year-old university student when a government-backed holocaust of unimaginable evil was unleashed upon my country’s minority tribe, the Tutsis. To be Tutsi in Rwanda, like my family, was a death sentence. In less than 100 days, almost the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda—more than a million innocent men, women, and children—were mercilessly tortured, raped, and butchered during what is now acknowledged as one of the most vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing in human history.

Almost every member of my immediate and extended family was murdered during the slaughter, and so was just about every other person I had ever loved or called a friend. I survived, thanks to the kindness of a local pastor who took mercy on me and seven other Tutsi women by hiding us in a tiny bathroom for three months. This was a journey I explored in my book ‘The Rosary: The Prayer That Saved My Life.’ In it, I share the fear and despair that were my constant companions and worst enemies as killers hunted me. Thoughts of opening the door and ending the torture of waiting for the killers to find me plagued me, and the devil whispered in my ear. But even during the darkest days of my life, I was able to find God and fill my heart with a love that enabled me to forgive those who had killed my family. This led me to become an international teacher spreading the message of love, hope, and our human potential for forgiveness and rebuilding a world of love according to God’s ways. Over the last decades, I have shared what I know to be true with world leaders, schoolchildren, churches, and hundreds of thousands of souls longing for release from suffering across the globe.”

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