No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Mpilo Tutu

I literally just completed reading No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu, and I must admit that this book made my heart heavy. To read what people went through in South Africa during Apartheid is enough to make a person "cry a river," and I really mean, "cry a river!"

When Bishop Desmond Tutu heard of all of the horrible things that happened to people under Apartheid he wrote:

"In a bold anthropomorphic vein I can picture God surveying the awful wrecks that litter human history- how the earth is soaked with the blood of so many innocent who have died brutally. God has seen two World Wars in this century alone plus the Holocaust, the genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda, the awfulness in the Sudan, Sierra Leone, the two Congos, Northern Ireland, and the Middle East, and the excess that have characterized Latin America. It is a baneful catalog that records our capacity to wreck considerable harm on one another and our gross inhumanity to our fellow humans. I imagine God surveying it all, seeing how His children treat their sisters and brothers. God would weep as Jesus wept over the hardhearted and unresponsive Jerusalem, where he had come to his own people, and they would not receive him......." (Excerpted from No Future Without by Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu. Page 95.)

However, later in the book Bishop Tutu states:

"But I am certain there had been many more times when God has looked and seen all those wonderful people who have shone in the dark night of evil and torture and abuses and suffering; shone as they have demonstrated  their nobility of spirit, their magnanimity as they have been ready to forgive, and so they have dispelled the murkiness, and fresh air has blown into that situation to transfigure it......Each of us has a capacity for great good and that is what makes God say it was well worth the risk to bring us into existence.... God believes in us. God depends on us to help make this world all that God wants it to be."(Excerpted from No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmond Tutu. Page 123.)

When you want to know how to forgive and move forward, this book could definitely be a starting point; however, my mind is still grappling with the idea of a WHOLE country persevering and moving forward and being an example for the rest of the world.

Anything, and I mean, Anything is possible.......

Two of my favorite men: Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela