By Ciona Rouse
Mama Shekinah is like a pied piper. As soon as you enter her presence, you want to draw nearer to her. When I met her, she stood tall and lean with slightly storied skin. Her smile challenged the Ugandan sun. Her long blond locks were pulled away from her face into a ponytail. Her daughter, Shekinah, peered around Mama’s leg, one thumb in her mouth and the other hand securely fastened to Mama’s hand.
Mama Shekinah was born in Paraguay and named Hedwig, and commonly called Hedi. After serving in missions for ten years, Hedi married Colin, a man from Bermuda who wanted to become a pastor. Together they discerned a calling to teach reconciliation and serve in ministry and mission in the war-torn east African countries.
On one of their journeys, the pair had just passed from Uganda into Sudan, when the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) ambushed them. This rebel militia has wreaked havoc on northern Uganda for more than twenty years, attacking the villages of the Acholi people and mercilessly beating, abducting, or murdering others who got in the way, even in southern Sudan. They are infamous for abducting children and forcing them to be soldiers.
The soldiers attacked Colin and Hedwig, who was three months pregnant. Though they spared her life, the young soldiers brutally murdered Colin. She remembers holding her husband, who was bruised, bloody, and barely breathing, and looking into the eyes of the soldiers. They were children, one a female. In that moment, when life as she knew it was stripped from her, Hedwig firmly decided that she must forgive these young soldiers for murdering her husband.
For almost two years, Hedwig nursed her wounds and regained her health. Six months after Colin’s death, she gave birth to Shekinah, the daughter she and Colin named before his death. It means “the dwelling presence of God” in Hebrew. Then she and Shekinah returned to Africa, this time to dwell in northern Uganda in a home with young girls—former child soldiers of the LRA.
These girls, who had been pulled from their homes and trained to murder, affectionately call Hedwig “Mama Shekinah.” Her home became their home.
From Like Breath and Water: The Journey of Pray with Africa, by Ciona Rouse. Used by permission of Upper Room Books. All rights reserved.
Reflection Questions:
If you were in a situation similar to Mama Shekinah’s, having watched a loved one be brutally beaten to death, would you be able to forgive?
The Lord’s Prayer contains the line, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Does this compel us to forgive?
What options do we as Christians have if we cannot find the strength to forgive?