The Rutba House – A Model of Love

By John Paul Womble

When the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, my wife Leah and I were part of a Christian Peacemaker Team delegation that went to Baghdad to be with the people there while the bombs fell. We knew no way to stop the bombs from falling. But we believed that part of what it means to follow Jesus is to stand with those who are suffering as they suffer. So we followed Jesus to Baghdad.

It wasn’t long, however, before Saddam’s police decided they didn’t want Christian peacemakers in Baghdad any more than the U.S. Army did. So we were deported in three taxi cabs by way of the highway that goes to Jordan through the western desert of Iraq. Close to a town called Rutba, one of our cars hit a piece of the shrapnel that littered the road after nearly two weeks of bombing.  A tire blew and the car careened into a side ditch. But those of us in the other two cars were driving so fast that we didn’t notice our friends were no longer behind us. By the time we returned, we found the car overturned and splattered with blood and our friends gone.

What we didn’t know then was that a car of Iraqis had seen our friends in the ditch by the roadside and stopped to pick them up.  They carried them into the town of Rutba and found a doctor who spoke perfect English. “Three days ago your country bombed our hospital,” the doctor said. “But we will take care of you.” He sewed up two of our friends and saved their lives.

When we found our friends and heard this story, I thanked the doctor and asked what we owed him for his services. “You do not owe me anything,” he said. “Please just tell the world what has happened in Rutba.” We came back to the U.S. telling that story every chance we could get. The more we told it, the more we realized that it was a modern day Good Samaritan story. The people who were supposed to be our enemies had stopped by the roadside, pulled our friends out of a ditch, and saved their lives. In the midst of a terrible war, God had sent some Iraqis to show us what love looks like.

After returning from Iraq, we moved to Durham, North Carolina to start a house of hospitality in the summer of 2003. We said we wanted to try to practice in our daily lives the love we had seen in Iraq. So we called our little experiment the Rutba House.

What we do here day in and day out is hardly as dramatic as rescuing enemies from a roadside while bombs are falling. But the drama of Rutba was not the important thing. What mattered was the gift of love. We’ve tried to find ways to shape our community life together around receiving and sharing God's love.

So we remind ourselves of how much God loves us by reading Scripture and praying together each morning and evening. We celebrate the supper in which Jesus gave us his body and blood while we were living as his enemies. We share our space, our money, our meals and our stuff with one another. We take Jesus at his word—“my peace I give to you”—and try to live together in unity. We fail at this pretty often, but we are reminded of the forgiving love that got us into this thing to start with. And we try to live in that love.

We invite others into this little experiment. Neighbors join us for dinner and we make space for a couple of people who are homeless to come and live with us. Almost always these are people who struggle with addiction. They help us see how many of our own struggles could be named “addiction.” We struggle together, believing that God still loves us even when it looks like everything is falling apart. We try to live as Sarah and Abraham learned to live—“by faith.”

Not long ago a kid from our neighborhood stole some money from a community member's wallet. It certainly wasn't the first time this had happened, but in this case, we were almost sure we knew who had done it. We confronted her and found the money she'd taken in her sock drawer. We talked with her about why stealing is wrong and we talked about repentance. Then the woman she had stolen from said she forgave her. But the kid just stood there crying, overcome by grief and fear.

The next day I watched as the woman from our community returned from a local pool with a carload of kids from the neighborhood.  As they filed out of the back seat, there was the kid who had stolen the day before, laughing with all the rest. As the Book of Isaiah says, her tears had turned to laughter. She skipped across the street with an inflatable alligator float under her arm, and I thought about how forgiveness has the power to transform.  I remembered those good Iraqis who gave their enemies a ride to Rutba.  And I thought of a God who returned to the company of those who betrayed him to say, “I give you my peace.”