In August, three friends and I journeyed to Rwanda in search of stories of forgiveness and reconciliation between survivors of the 1994 genocide and those who slaughtered their families. It was gritty, soul-wrenching work. If not for grace, it might have been too much. But, grace breathed its fragrance around every stomach-churning story, every mother’s anguished moan, every orphan’s lonely prayer. And so, I invite you to journey with me for a few minutes, to peak behind the bloodied machetes at a few tender shoots of grace.

 If genocide had a face it would be that of the woman who waited, arms limp, eyes empty, ready to escort my friends and I inside the crypt, otherwise known as the genocide memorial of Nyamata, a church where 4,000 were decimated in the first wave of the slaughter. We follow her, a gatekeeper among the dead, a hollow woman whose very husband and children were killed in this church.

Death crusts the sanctuary, almost oozing from its pews. Pinpoints of light pierce the tin ce iling. Bullet holes. Light, by darkness made.

Wails of dying children resound in the ever-increasing stench of silence. A blood-stained altar—life smashed, dashed upon the altar of a madman’s vengeance. I once read that it was the devil, in the shape of neighbors who wielded machetes.

We follow our ghostly leader down a shadowy corridor. Skulls stack the walls. The eerie tranquility overwhelms me. It is too much. I can not breathe the death oppressive air anymore. I ache for grace.

I am alone outside the church now. My friends have followed the guide back inside the church. A slight breeze rustles the leaves above my head. I glance up. A purple flower blooms, ignorant to the horror. A small child brushes past on his way to school. His backpack jostles. He smiles shyly at the foreigner. He, too, knows no horror.

Within the hour, I am standing in front of a second memorial—a second church. This one couldn’t protect the 5,000 that died there. Rumpled shirts and pants drape the walls, hovering like ghosts around the pews, benches of former praise. Clumps of blasted wall reveal where the killers gained access to their victims. At the front of the sanctuary, shoes pile high, pens hang from a wire—a shocking reminder of the potential that was lost. A single coffin encases an entire family, stacked upon the altar.

In the corner, behind the piles of faded life, a smudged mural, three small tiles. In the middle, a picture of two women, one’s hands are raised in praise, the other bows in exaltation. Behind them, a gray stone—rolled away. Death defeated, even here in this crumbling crypt.

Somewhere, in this deafening silence, I can almost hear the choir that once filled these now forsaken pews—“O Death, where is thy victory? Death, where is thy sting?”

A purple flower, a child, the remembrance of a stone rolled away—glimpses of grace upon a battered history.

But they are just emblems of a far greater grace I later discovered. The peace I observed in the gentle smile of a woman who forgave the man who murdered her father. The longsuffering I witnessed in the machete-gashed neck of another woman who extended mercy to the man who wounded her. The mercy I met in the prayer of an orphan for the man who killed his family.

Here, there was no deafening silence. The grace I met in them resounded with a thunderclap.