Her Brothers House

Marcianna had no land, no father and now no husband.  But she did have children to care for.  Preferring the company of another wife, her husband had just chased her and their two little ones away.  The story of division and estrangement begun in the garden of Eden continues to bear its bitter fruit:  husband vs. wife; parents against children; until hope is poisoned and despair reaches into darkness.

After Marcianna was rejected by her husband she and the children moved into the unlit 10' by 10' mud brick room (with a tarp for a roof) already containing her mother and sister that was added to her brothers crowded house.  Then she tried to find redress in the courts.  She soon found out that because she was her husband's second wife (a situation relatively uncommon these days in Rwanda), she had no rights.  Undaunted, she tried to secure land from her father's estate through the courts.  But since her mother was also a second wife again Marcianna's claim had no legal status.

Marcianna began to despair.  She said she felt like "no one."  She wondered if she was a worse sinner than the other people she knew.  Perhaps God was singling her out for special punishment?  Close to suicide, she was brought to a Christian pastor named Justin.  He immediately began to advocate for her in the courts. 

With Justin behind her, the courts heard her argument and she won a little bit of land far away from her mothers family.  It wasn't much, but it was a start.  And God was working in other ways as well.  Some friends of Justin's in America had become prayer partners to Marcianna.  When Justin came to visit they asked about her and were moved with compassion.  "How can we do nothing when we have so much and she has so little?" they asked themselves.

They saved up money and sent it by wire to the diocese.  Soon men and women from the church brought timbers for the frame.  They bought corrugated tin for the roof.  They busted through the addition's wall for the opening into a much bigger mud-walled room they were building.  She started to feel like someone again.  She had her own space--shared with goats and chickens for sustenance, but still hers.  A real roof over her head.  Better than that she had friends and a new family that loves her.  She knows she has a Father in heaven.  Brothers and sisters on earth--even white ones from a land so far removed that only the power of Jesus could overcome the distance. 

Marcianna (in dark shirt) with her biological and church family

Though we had turned away from God and made paradise into a hell of estrangement and despair, God did not abandon us.  He sent his son is Jesus to live and die for us.  

St Paul writes that Jesus has "broken down the dividing wall of hostility" that separates Jew and Gentile (Eph 2:14).  Elsewhere he says that there all of our distinctions fade and are made irrelevant before the presence and power of Jesus Christ who, "is all, and is in all."  Because he is in us, we become sons.  Because he is everything important to the father, his virtues become ours.  Our identity shifts.

We are given his character, start to act like he acted, begin to move in his power, and slowly or quickly look more and more like him.

Marcianna knows that in Jesus the estrangement is over; she has a family again.  She is someone.   

Though living in poverty, Marcianna has since adopted another needy child who like her new mother is finding out that she too has value in the eyes of the Lord.    

see also our African blog at
http://mittentoafrica.wordpress.com/