When Every Bottle Counted

In April 1994, as machete-wielding Interahamwe militia swept through Kigali, Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina faced an impossible situation with nothing but a hotel at his disposal. The Hutu manager of the Hôtel des Mille Collines — a four-star property owned by Belgian airline Sabena — began taking in Tutsi neighbors and strangers fleeing the genocide that would claim over 800,000 lives in one hundred days.

Rusesabagina had no weapons, no army, no political authority. What he had was a building with rooms, a kitchen with food, a cellar stocked with wine and whiskey, and a phone line that still worked. So he used every one of them. He bribed militia commanders with expensive liquor to delay their raids. He called and faxed foreign contacts — diplomats, corporate executives, anyone who might apply pressure from the outside. He stretched dwindling food and water supplies across 1,268 refugees packed into a hotel built for far fewer.

He turned the ordinary tools of hospitality into instruments of rescue.

Jesus said, "I was a stranger and you invited Me in" (Matthew 25:35). Rusesabagina reminds us that God rarely asks us to produce resources we don't have. He asks us to use what is already in our hands — a spare room, a phone call, a meal, a connection — with courage and creativity. Resourcefulness in the Kingdom is not about having more. It is about offering everything we do have when a stranger stands at the door.