The Hotel Manager Who Refused to Look Away

In April 1994, machetes and madness swept through the streets of Kigali. Rwanda's genocide had begun, and within hours, rivers of desperate Tutsi families began streaming toward the Hôtel des Mille Collines — a Belgian-owned luxury hotel in the heart of the capital. Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu hotel manager married to a Tutsi woman, faced the kind of choice most of us pray we never encounter. He opened the doors.

Over the following weeks, Rusesabagina sheltered 1,268 Tutsi and moderate Hutu refugees inside those walls. He bribed Hutu militia leaders with the hotel's liquor supply. He used the fax machine and telephone to plead with international contacts for intervention. When soldiers arrived at the gates demanding the refugees be surrendered, he negotiated, delayed, and stalled — buying hours that became days, days that became weeks. Every act of defiance risked his life and the lives of his own children.

Proverbs 24:11-12 speaks directly into rooms like the Mille Collines: "Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, 'But we knew nothing about this,' does not He who weighs the heart perceive it?"

God does not accept the excuse of convenient ignorance. Rusesabagina could see the slaughter outside his windows. He could not pretend otherwise. Neither can we. Courage is not the absence of fear — it is the refusal to let fear become permission to do nothing. Where in your life is God asking you to open a door that staying closed would be easier?